Lipschutz - After Authority

AFTER AUTHORITY
SUNY series in Global Politics

James N. Rosenau, editor
AFTER AUTHORITY
❖
War, Peace, and Global Politics
in the 21st Century
Ronnie D. Lipschutz
State University of New York Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lipschutz, Ronnie D.
After authority : war, peace, and global politics in the 21st
century / Ronnie D. Lipschutz.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in global politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-4561-5 (hc : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-7914-4562-3 (pbk.
: alk. paper)
1. World politics—1989– 2. War. 3. Peace. I. Title.
II. Series.
D860.L55 2000
909.82'9—dc21 99-38551
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Lee Grodzins
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 Theory of Global Politics 1

2 The Worries of Nations 13
3 The Insecurity Dilemma 33
4 Arms and Affluence 63
5 Markets, the State, and War 83
6 The Social Contraction 107
7 The Princ(ipal) 133
8 Politics among People 155
Notes 183
Bibliography 197
Index 221
vii
Acknowledgments
Once, it seems, we knew what to do.

—Bronislaw Szerszynski, “On Knowing What to Do”
This book has been a long time coming. It is the second in what I have
come to think of as my “security triology.” The first was On Security
(Columbia, 1995), the third is tentatively entitled Minds at Peace, and
it should appear sometime early in the next millennium. Although
some of the preliminary thinking behind this volume occurred in the
mid- to late-1980s, the ideas did not really germinate until I arrived at
UC-Santa Cruz in 1990, and taught a senior seminar entitled “National
Security and Interdependence.” Looking at the literature, I began to
think more was needed in international relations than just epistemo-
logical debate and more was needed in foreign policy than simply
“redefining security.” I tried, therefore, to write on globalization and
national security during my first few years at UCSC, but the book
refused to be written. Eventually, I gave up, and went on to other
books and other projects. Sometimes, however, books come together
quite unexpectedly, and when I returned to the project in 1997,
I discovered that a number of papers and articles I had written,
ix
x Acknowledgments
presented, and published fit together in what I thought (and what I

hope you think) is an interesting and provocative way.
As is always the case with such books, they are the product of
more than one person, although I take full responsibility for everything
that appears here. In the course of thinking about and writing what
appears here, I have incurred more debts to friends and colleagues
than I am now able to recall. Among those who have, in one way or
another, helped me along the way are Beverly Crawford, Ken Conca,
Gene Rochlin, Peter Euben, Karen Litfin, James Rosenau, Hayward
Alker (who suggested the title), Mary Ann Tetreault, and David Meyer
(and, needless to say, many more). My wife, Mary, and my children,
Eric and Maia, deserve the utmost thanks and love for showing such
great forebearance in dealing with almost constant grumpiness. Fi-
nally, I dedicate this book to Lee Grodzins who, as my graduate ad-
visor at MIT, saw that heavy-ion nuclear physics was not in my future.
Financial support for various parts of this book have come from
a variety of sources, including: the Social Sciences Division and Aca-
demic Senate of UC-Santa Cruz, the UC Systemwide Institute on Global
Conflict and Cooperation at UC-San Diego, the Center for German
and European Studies at UC-Berkeley, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and
the Lipschutz-Wieland Research Periphery.
Portions of chapter 2 originally appeared in Ronnie D. Lipschutz,
“The Great Transformation Revisited,” Brown Journal of World Af-
fairs 4, no. 1 (winter/spring 1997): 299–318. Copyright 1997 Brown
Journal of World Affairs, reprinted by permission.
Portions of chapters 3 and 4 originally appeared in Ronnie D.
Lipschutz, “On Security,” pp. 1–23, and “Negotiating the Boundaries
of Difference and Security at Millenium’s End,” pp. 212–28, in Ronnie
D. Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995). Copyright 1995, Columbia University Press, reprinted by per-
mission of the publisher.
A different version of chapter 5 was published as Ronnie D.
Lipschutz, “The Nature of Sovereignty and the Sovereignty of Nature:
Problematizing the Boundaries between Self, Society, State, and Sys-
tem,” in Karen T. Litfin (ed.), The Greening of Sovereignty in World
Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). Copyright 1998 MIT Press,
reprinted by permission.
Acknowledgments xi
Portions of chapter 6 were originally published as Ronnie

Lipschutz and Beverly Crawford, “Economic Globalization and the
‘New’ Ethnic Strife: What is to be Done?” San Diego: Institute on
Global Conflict and Cooperation, UC-San Diego, (Policy Paper 25,
May 1996). Copyright 1996 IGCC, reprinted by permission; Ronnie
D. Lipschutz, “Seeking a State of One’s Own: An Analytical Frame-
work for Assessing ‘Ethnic and Sectarian Conflicts’,” in: Beverly
Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipschutz (eds.), The Myth of “Ethnic
Conflict” (Berkeley: Institute of International and Area Studies, UC-
Berkeley, 1998). Copyright 1998 IIAS, reprinted by permission; and
Ronnie D. Lipschutz with Judith Mayer, Global Civil Society and
Global Environmental Governance (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1996), chap. 7.
Different versions of Chapter 7 appear in Jose V. Ciprut (ed.),
“The State as Moral Authority in a Evolving Global Political Economy,”
The Art of the Feud: Reconceptualizing International Relations
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, forthcoming 2000); and David
Jacobsen, Mathias Albert and Yosef Lapid (eds.), “(B)orders and
(Dis)Orders: The Role of Moral Authority in Global Politics,” Identi-
ties, Borders and Order (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
forthcoming 2000).
Chapter 8 draws on a number of sources, including Ronnie D.
Lipschutz, “Reconstructing World Politics: The Emergence of Global
Society,” Millennium 21, no. 3 (winter 1992): 389–420 (published in re-
vised form in Jeremy Larkins and Rick Fawn, eds., International Society
after the Cold War, London, Macmillan, 1996). Copyright 1992, 1996,
Millennium Publishing Group, reprinted by permission; Ronnie D.
Lipschutz, “From Place to Planet: Local Knowledge and Global Environ-
mental Governance,” Global Governance: A Review of Multilateralism
and International Organization 3, no. 1 (January–April 1997): 83–102.
Copyright 1997, Lynne Rienner Publishers, reprinted with permission of
the publisher; Ronnie D. Lipschutz, “Members Only? Citizenship and
Civic Virtue in a Time of Globalization,” International Politics 36, no. 2
(June 1999): 203–233. Copyright 1999, Kluwer Law International, re-
printed by permission; and Ronnie D. Lipschutz, “Politics among People:
Global Civil Society Reconsidered,” in Heidi Hobbs, (ed.), Pondering
Postinternationalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).
1❖
THEORY OF GLOBAL POLITICS
The nation-state is in trouble. It is under siege by contradictory forces

of its own making and its leaders have no idea how to proceed. Para-
doxically, these forces are grounded in the end of the Cold War as well
as the broadly held goals of economic growth and the extension of
democracy and open markets throughout the world, the very things
that are supposed to foster peace and stability. Why should this be so?
As states open up to the world economy, they begin to lose one
of the raison d’êtres for which they first came into being: defense of
the sovereign nation. Political change and economic globalization
enhance the position of some groups and classes and erode that of
others. Liberalization and structural reform reduce the welfare role of
the state and cast citizens out on their own. As the state loses interest
in the well-being of its citizens, its citizens lose interest in the well-
being of the state. They look elsewhere for sources of identity and
focuses for their loyalty. Some build new linkages within and across
borders; others organize into groups determined to resist economic
penetration or to eliminate political competitors. The state loses con-
trol in some realms and tries to exercise greater control in others.
Military force is of little utility under such circumstances. While it
1
2 Chapter 1
remains the reserve currency of international relations, it is of limited

use in changing the minds of people. Instead, police power and disci-
pline, both domestic and foreign, are applied more and more. Even
these don’t really work, as any cop on the beat can attest. Order is
under siege; disorder is on the rise; authority is crumbling.
These are hardly new arguments. The search for a unifying theory
of international politics and world order has been underway for cen-
turies, if not longer. Such ideas were offered by classical and premodern
theorists of politics, such as Thucydides, Hobbes, Kant, List, and various
geopoliticians, beginning with Admiral Mahan in the final decade of
the 1800s, continuing with Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman
during the middle of the twentieth century, and ending with Colin
Gray in the 1990s. After World War II, new theories were offered by
Morgenthau, Aron, Waltz, and others. Most recently, in the wake of
the Cold War’s end, these theories have been restated, albeit in a
different form, by Samuel Huntington (1996), Benjamin Barber (1995),
and Robert Kaplan (1994, 1996). So why another book on the subject
of war, peace, and global politics? One reason is that most of the
others have it wrong. That the world is changing is doubted by only
a few; how and why it is changing, and what is its trajectory, is hardly
clear to anyone.
The approach of the millennium has further enflamed the collec-
tive imagination, both popular and scholarly, adding fuel to the fire.
But most books and films—The Coming Conflict with China (Bernstein
and Munro, 1997), Independence Day and Armageddon, and the “Y2K”
furor come to mind here—offer the reader (and the policymaker) a
biblical dichotomy: the choice between order and chaos, light and
darkness, civilization and barbarity. Order draws for its inspiration on
both the recent (and antedeluvian) pasts (Noble, 1997), suggesting that
a world of well-defined nation-states, under American rule and disci-
pline, still offers the best hope for reducing the risks of war and
enhancing the possibilities for teleological human improvement. Chaos
reaches even farther back, to the authors of the Bible, as well as the
writings of Hobbes, Rousseau, and others, who warned that, in the
absence of government, there is only a “State of Nature,” the “war of
every one against every one.” The reality (and here, I wish to avoid
debates over what is “real” and what “real” means; see Kubálková,
Onuf, and Kowert, 1998) is more likely to be found somewhere in
Theory of Global Politics 3
between these two poles or even elsewhere. It is always difficult to

ascertain the trajectories of change when one stands in the midst of
that change.
In a prescient 1991 inaugural lecture at the University College of
Wales in Aberystwyth, site of the world’s first department of Interna-
tional Relations, Ken Booth put his finger on the central point. He
argued that
sovereignty is disintegrating. States are less able to perform their

traditional functions. Global factors increasingly impinge on all
decisions made by governments. Identity patterns are becoming
more complex, as people assert local loyalties but want to share
in global values and lifestyles. The traditional distinction between
“foreign” and “domestic” policy is less tenable than ever. And
there is growing awareness that we are sharing a common world
history. . . . The [metaphor for the] international system which is
now developing . . . is of an egg-box containing the shells of sov-
ereignty; but alongside it a global community omelette is cook-
ing. (Booth, 1991:542)
What Booth did not pinpoint were the reasons for the “disintegration
of sovereignty” or, for that matter, where it might lead. Indeed, al-
though virtually everyone writing on the future of world politics takes
as a starting point the decline in the sovereign prerogatives of the state,
almost no one places the responsibility for this loss directly on the
state itself. It is not that the governments of contemporary states have
meant to lose sovereignty; they were searching for means to further
enhance their power, control and sovereignty. Rather, it was that cer-
tain institutional practices set in train after World War II have, para-
doxically, reduced the sovereign autonomy that was, after all, the
ultimate objective of the Allied forces in that war.
Indeed, if there is a single central “unintended consequence” of
the international politics and economics of the past fifty years, it is the
replacement of the sovereign state by the sovereign individual as the
subject of world politics. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that
states are bound to disappear, or that the “legitimate monopoly of
violence” will, somehow, be reassigned to tribes, clans, or individuals
(although some, such as Kaplan [1996] and Martin van Creveld [1991],
argue that, in many places, this has already happened). Instead, it is to
4 Chapter 1
argue that the project of “globalization” (an ill-defined and all-encom-

passing term, discussed in chapter 2), its commitment to individualism
in politics, markets, and civil society, and the decline in the likelihood
of large-scale wars and threats around which national mobilization can
occur, have made reification of the individual the highest value of
many societies, both developed and developing. But because global-
ization has different effects on different people, and some find them-
selves better off while others are worse off, individual sovereignty is
not accepted by all as a positive value; there is reason to question,
moreover, whether it should be regarded positively (Hirsch, 1995).
The heedless pursuit of individual self-interest can have corrosive
impacts on long-standing institutions, cultures, and hierarchies, and
can lead to a degree of social destabilization that may collapse into
uncontrolled violence and destruction.
The implications of this process for sovereignty, authority, and
security are manifold. Whereas it used to be taken for granted that the
nation-state was the object to be secured by the power of the state, the
disappearance of singular enemies has opened a fundamental ontologi-
cal hole, an insecurity dilemma, if you will. Inasmuch as different
threats or threatening scenarios promise to affect different individuals
and groups differently, there is no overarching enemy that can be used
for purposes of mass mobilization (a theme of one of Huntington’s
more recent articles; see Huntington, 1997). Those concerned about
computer hackers penetrating their cyberspace are rarely the same as
those concerned about whether they will still be welcome in their
workplaces tomorrow. Whereas it used to be taken for granted that
threats to security originated from without—from surprise attacks,
invading armies, and agents who sometimes managed to turn citizens
into traitors—globalization’s erosion of national authority has man-
aged to create movements of “patriotic” dissidence whose targets are
traitorous governments in the seats of national power.1
The old threats were countries with bombs; the new threats are
individuals with mail privileges. The old threat was the electromag-
netic pulse from exo-atmospheric nuclear detonations; the new threat
is information warfare by rogue states, terrorist groups (and corpora-
tions?). The old threat was communist subversion by spies, sympathiz-
ers, and socialist teachers; the new threat is juvenile subversion by
pornography on the World Wide Web. The old threat was aggressive
dictators; the new threat is abusive parents. In short, loyalty to the state
has been replaced by loyalty to the self, and national authority has
been shouldered aside by self-interest. The world of the future might
not be one of 200 or 500 or even 1,000 (semi-) sovereign states co-
existing uneasily; it could well be one in which every individual is
a state of her own, a world of 10 billion statelets, living in a true State
of Nature.
What This Book Is About
This book reflects on these matters, on the “end” of authority, sover-

eignty, and national security at the conclusion of the twentieth century,
and on the implications of that end for war, peace, and individual and
global politics in the twenty-first. I am not so foolish as to argue here
that these phenomena will cease to exist in the near future or that the
state is doomed to disappear. And I have no intention of brushing over
the genealogies of these concepts or, for that matter, the state and state
system in speculating on the global political environment of the twenty-
first century. But I do propose here that, in the long view of history,
the two hundred-odd years between 1789 and 1989 were exceptional
in that the nation-state was unchallenged by any other form of political
organization at the global level.2 That exceptional period is now just
about over.
What will emerge over the coming decades is by no means de-
termined or even clear. As the extent of social change becomes more
evident, strong states could reassert their primacy and drive the world
back into a new period of geopolitical competition (as could happen
in East Asia; see, e.g., Bernstein and Munro, 1997). It is entirely
possible that global civil society and institutions of transnational gov-
ernance will, to a significant degree, supplement or supplant national
governments, without undermining the basis for the nation (as appears
to be taking place in Europe; see Lipschutz, 1996). Or, the resulting
social tensions might be so severe as to cause a collapse into violent
chaos and nonstate forms of governance (as some suggest is occurring
in various parts of Africa and some urban agglomerations; see Jack-
son, 1990). Perhaps these, and other, forms of political community and
action will coexist, as the medieval and the modern were forced to do
6 Chapter 1
during the transition from one to the other. I make few predictions, and
no promises.
I begin, in chapter 2, with “The Worries of Nations.” One of the
much-noted paradoxes of the 1990s is the coexistence of processes of
integration and fragmentation, of globalism and particularism, of si-
multaneous centralization and decentralization often in the very same
place. James Rosenau (1990) has coined the rather unwieldy term
“fragmegration” to describe this phenomenon, which he ascribes largely
to the emergence of a “sovereignty-free” world in the midst of a “sov-
ereignty-bound” one. Rosenau frames this “bifurcation” of world poli-
tics as a series of conceptual and practical “jailbreaks,” as people
acquire the knowledge and capabilities to break out of the political and
social structures that have kept them imprisoned for some centuries.
Rosenau’s theory—if it can be called that—is an essentially liberal
one and, while he acknowledges the importance of economic factors
in the split between the two worlds, he shies away from recognizing
the central role of material and economic change and the ancillary
processes of social innovation and reorganization in this phenomenon.
Without falling into a deterministic historical materialism, it is
critical to recognize just how central “production,” as Robert Cox
(1987) and Stephen Gill (1993) put it, is to the changes to which we
are witness. Production is more than just the making of things (by
which I mean material goods as well as knowledge); it is the making
of particular things under particular forms of social organization to
fufill particular societal purposes (Latour, 1986). These purposes are
not autonomous of the material basis of a society but neither are they
superstructure to that base. The two constitute each other and, through
practice, do so on a continuous and dynamically changing basis. So-
cial organization then becomes the means by which things are pro-
duced and used to fulfill those purposes. Lest this all seem too
tautological, or functionalist, there is more at work here than just
reproduction, as we shall see. Rosenau’s “fragmegration” is, thus, a
consequence of more than just the acquisition of knowledge and skills
in a postsovereign political space; it is a direct result of the particular
ways in which production and purpose have been pursued and the
forms of social organization established to facilitate that pursuit.
The simultaneous conditions of integration and fragmentation
are, then, part of the process of social innovation and reorganization
that go hand-in-hand with changes in production and purpose. Why,

after two hundred or more years of state consolidation and centraliza-
tion, this should happen now, is not immediately apparent although the
consequences are all too clear. Whether, on balance, this is to be
regarded as a positive or negative development remains to be seen.
What is clear is that there is no teleology invoked or involved here. I
do, however, attribute recent changes to forces similar to those de-
scribed by Karl Polanyi (1944/1957) in explaining the causes of the
two World Wars, and to the ways in which knowledge and social
innovation have transformed our relationship to the nation-state and to
each other.
In chapter 3, I turn to the “Insecurity Dilemma” and its relation-
ship to globalization. What does it mean to be threatened? What does
it mean to be secure? As in the myth of the Golden Fleece, the slaying
of the Great Soviet Dragon seems to have given rise to a proliferation
of smaller, poisonous lizards, most of which are merely annoying, but
some of which might be deadly. The difficulty comes in telling the two
apart. Integration and interdependence, it has long been supposed,
foster communication, understanding, and peace, especially among
democracies, but if fragmentation is taking place at the same time, in
which direction does the arrow of safety point?
Forty years ago, John Herz (1959) pointed out how the efforts of
some states to make themselves more secure often made other states
feel less secure (see also Jervis, 1978). Inasmuch as intentions could
not be known with certainty, while capabilities could be observed with
surety, it was better to assume the worst of one’s neighbor. Today, with
the proliferation of imagined threats—imagined in the sense that vir-
tually none have, as yet, come to pass—even capabilities can no longer
be fully scrutinized. Terrorists might have acquired weapons of mass
destruction—but we do not know for sure.3 Illegal immigrants are
subverting our cultures—but they are also supporting them. Mysteri-
ous diseases lurk in uncharted forests—but they can escape at a day’s
notice, without warning. And even the state cannot protect everyone
against these myriads of threats if it does not know whether or not they
are real (Lipschutz, 1999b).
The result is a wholesale transformation in the security appara-
tus of the state. Not only is it now directed against external enemies,
whomever and wherever they might be, but also against domestic ones—
8 Chapter 1
and these just might be the boy or girl next door. Soldiers become
cops. Cops acquire armored cars and tanks. Citizens are scrutinized
for criminal proclivities. Criminals adopt military armaments and prac-
tices. Even the paranoid have enemies and, in a paranoid society, can
anyone trust anyone except her/himself? (There may be good reason
to be paranoid, as we shall see in chapter 7; the chances are that
someone is watching you).
Historically, the purpose of “security” was to protect state and
society against war. In chapter 4, “Arms and Affluence,” I ask “What-
ever happened to World War III?” War has long been a staple topic of
film, fiction, and philosophy, if only because it is so uncommon. For
those in the midst of battle, there is hardly a big picture: One’s focus
is on survival from one moment to the next. For those who are observ-
ers, it is the infrequency and extremities of war that is so fascinating.
Yet, in virtually all discussions by international relations specialists,
war is taken not as a social institution that can, somehow, be elimi-
nated through deliberate political action, but as a “natural” outgrowth
of human nature and relations between human collectives (see, e.g.,
Waltz, 1959). Where the interests of such collectives come into conflict,
it is assumed, war will result; conversely, if collectives can negotiate
over their interests, peace is possible. Experience suggests we be more
cautious in making such unqualified claims.
Paradoxically, while the war of all against all develops apace, the
wars of state against state become ever more uncommon. The United
States prepares itself for future regional wars, such as the one under-
taken against Iraq, in the face of compelling evidence that such wars
erupt no more than once every decade or two. In place of really existing
war, we now confront virtual warfare, or what I call here “disciplinary
deterrence.” This is war by other means: by example, by punishment, by
public relations. It rests upon the United States not as world policeperson
but as dominatrix, or global vice-principal strolling down the high school
hallway, checking miscreants for hall passes. Violators, such as Iraq, get
spanked (giving new meanings to bondage and domination), and serve
as warning to others who might think about causing trouble. I return to
the implications of this metaphor in chapter 7.
Hobbes and Locke argued that Leviathan and the social contract
were necessary to counter the State of Nature, a condition in which the
sole moral stricture was to survive. Only through the state could men
(and women) begin to build societies and civilizations. In chapter 5,

“Markets, the State, and War,” I examine wars over nature, so-called
resource wars that some think could take place over scarce water. In
these cases, the limits of nature are presumed to lead to conflict and
war among those who require scarce natural goods (Lipschutz, 1989).
This amounts to a political redistribution of access meant to redress
the arbitrary boundaries of state and geography.
The solution offered to impasses of this sort is exchange in the
market, a practice and institution that, left to operate on it own under
orderly conditions, can impose peace through the price mechanism.
But markets are no less political than any other human institution; they
require rules to operate properly, and someone must formulate such
rules (Attali, 1997). Moreover, relying on markets to defuse conflicts
over resources and environment could have the perverse effect of re-
turning us to something much closer to the State of Nature through the
naturalization of market relations. Naturalizing the market removes it
from the domain of everyday politics by representing it as immutable
and subject neither to change nor to external authority. This, as I point
out, is an act of power and domination whose outcomes are quite
unlikely to be equitable or legitimate. Indeed, letting the market work
its magic may result in no more than a transitory “neoliberal” peace
that ultimately leads to vast distributive inequities and a new round of
violence (Lipschutz, 1999a).
Most contemporary wars are neither between states nor about
resources. Chapter 6, “The Social Contraction” explores the causes
and consequences of wars within nation-states, especially as mani-
fested through what we have come to call “ethnic” or “sectarian”
conflict. Conventional wisdom attributes these cultural wars to socio-
biology, ancient animosities, and the need for human beings to differ-
entiate themselves from one another. Yet, there is a fundamental problem
with such explanations: They fail to tell us in convincing fashion why
such violence did not develop earlier or why earlier periods of vio-
lence were followed by times of relative peace and stability. Even such
arguments as authoritarian governments “keeping the lid on the kettle”
are no more than inaccurate metaphors; politics is neither classical
mechanics nor thermodynamics nor even chaos theory.
Rather than being understood as some sort of atavistic or
premodern phenomenon, cultural conflict should be seen as a modern
10 Chapter 1
(or even postmodern) response to fundamental social change. The

unachievable dream of political theorists and practitioners is stability,
now and forever; the undeniable truth is change, always and every-
where. During periods of “normality,” change is slower and more
predictable; it can be managed, up to a point. Over the past few de-
cades, we have been witness to more rapid and less predictable changes,
brought about by globalization and social innovation. These changes
have destabilized the political hierarchies that rule over social orders—
even democratic ones—and provided opportunities for those who might
seek greater power and wealth to do so. The conflicts and clashes that
result can tear societies apart.
The tools for popular mobilization are both contextual and con-
tingent; the phenomenon of social warfare, as Jim Seaton (1994) calls
it, has changed only in form, but not in content. During the Cold War,
political elites mobilized polities and gained power using the discourse
of East versus West, Marxist versus Capitalist. Today, culture has
become the language under which political action takes place, and
elites operate accordingly. In all cases, it is the contractual basis of
social order that is under challenge and being destroyed. When people
find their prospects uncertain and dismal, they tend to go with those
who can promise a better, more promising future. Cultural solidarity
draws on such teleological scenarios and pie in the sky, by and by.
In Chapter 7, “The Princ(ipal),” I explore how the state—espe-
cially the American state—is engaged in both international and domes-
tic discipline in the effort to maintain political order amidst the disorder
generated by globalization. While conventional wisdom sees the nation-
state as a functional provider of security, identity, and welfare, it is better
understood as an actor that seeks to project its own, unique, national
morality into world politics. Each nation-state, as guardian of its own
civil religion and inheritor of a moral authority bequeathed to it by
Church and Prince (yes, even the United States!), is seen by its members
as the total embodiment of good. In this ethnocentric ontology, there-
fore, all other nation-states come to be representatives of evil. Those
states with power try to impose their moralities onto world politics, in
the view that the triumph of good can follow only from total domina-
tion. If this is not possible, the next best thing is obedience.
The globalization of markets, however, poses an unprecedented
challenge to statist moralities. In market society, consumption is a
good (and is good), and it is the individual’s responsibility to consume

according to his or her needs and desires. Authority thus comes to rest
within each individual, whose self-interested behavior becomes, ipso
facto, a moral good (although some might call it nihilism). The state,
seeking to reimpose order, is forced to demonstrate its authority by
acting as a moral agent able to impose its wishes both abroad and at
home. Culture wars are one result, for material girls and boys are not
so easily lured back inside the old moral borders.
Are politics in the twenty-first century destined to be so grim?
Not necessarily. Trends are never destiny. We are constrained, but we
can make choices. In chapter 8, “Politics among People,” I suggest a
more optimistic possibility. For better or worse, the end of the twen-
tieth century has seen a gradual shift of political power away from the
nation-state to the local and the global. Downward decentralization
and upward concentration could be disempowering, or they might
provide the means for global diversity and democratization. Some
governance functions are becoming globalized; others are being de-
volved to the local level. If we are not to let the global capture the
critical functions and leave the irrelevant ones to the local, it is nec-
essary to find ways to have global rules and local diversity, a
transnational politics that is both democratic and action-oriented. I
suspect that “global civil society” might be one means of accomplish-
ing this end, but there are other possibilities to offer, as we shall see.
If we leave politics to the market, we will be able to choose
among cereals, toilet paper, automobiles. If we bring politics back in,
opportunities for choices will be broader, more appealing and more
just. Political action is, therefore, an absolute necessity; if we fail to
act, we may be fat but we will not be happy. The world, “after author-
ity,” can be ours to fashion, if we so decide.
2❖
THE WORRIES OF NATIONS
Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied

a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any
length of time without annihilating the human and natural
substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man
and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.
—Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
More than half a century has passed since Karl Polanyi penned those
words. He wrote The Great Transformation in the midst of the greatest
conflagration human civilization has yet known, and, ever since, his
book been regarded as one of the classics of modern political economy.
Polanyi sought to explain why the twentieth century, then not yet half
over, had already been rent by two great wars. Where most blamed
“accidents” for World War I, and Germany, Japan and the Great De-
pression for World War II, Polanyi found an explanation in the dreams
and failures of nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalists and the market
processes originally set in train during the early years of the first
Industrial Revolution, between 1800 and 1850. The nineteenth century
was a time of social and technological innovation and reorganization
at a scale theretofore unexperienced by anyone. It left an indelible
13
14 Chapter 2
mark on the world and its impacts are still being felt today. The “Great
Transformation” led to the emergence of the modern nation-state as an
active political and economic player in people’s everyday lives and
turned it into an aggressive agent in international relations. It also
resulted, in the twentieth century, in the two world wars.
It would seem unlikely that a fifty-year-old book about events
taking place almost two hundred years ago would have anything to say
to us about either today or the future. Nonetheless, many of the same
phenomena examined by Polanyi are, once again, at work today. In
this chapter, I argue that we have entered a period of social change for
which the history of the Industrial Revolution, and the events that
followed, merit close scrutiny for contemporary parallels. To be sure,
things are not the same, but there are a number of important similari-
ties between then and now. In particular, as the twenty-first century
begins, we find ourselves living through a period of social and tech-
nological innovation and reorganization, taking place not only within
countries but also globally—a phenomenon that is often called “glo-
balization.” We might expect that, as happened in the past, unantici-
pated social and political consequences will follow (on globalization,
see, e.g., Gill and Mittleman, 1997; Sakamoto, 1994; Castells, 1996,
1997, 1998). In the later chapters of this book, we shall see that these
consequences may be violent or peaceful, integrative or fragmenting,
bringing prosperity to some and poverty to others. For now, these are
mostly only possibilities. At some point during the coming century,
however, it is likely that new patterns of global politics will become
clear. We may then be able to look back, as Polanyi did, and describe
how events, processes of change, and human actions during the second
half of the twentieth century led to the new patterns of the twenty-first.
At this point, the future remains cloudy and we can only speculate.
I begin this chapter with a general discussion of industrial revo-
lutions and their impacts within nation-states and on relations between
them. The key element here is social innovation and reorganization at
scales running from the household to the global. I then turn to an
analysis of the “Cold War Compromise,” the concerted attempt follow-
ing World War II to avoid the reemergence of those conditions that
were thought to have led to the two world wars, and especially World
War II. The “compromise” represented the United States’ attempt to
steer the global political and economic system toward stability and
The Worries of Nations 15
prosperity by reproducing, as much as possible, domestic American

conditions abroad. As we shall see, the Compromise was largely a
success, but it has had quite unforeseen results. I then describe the
origins of the Third Industrial Revolution (a.k.a. the “information revo-
lution”) in the great applied science projects of World War II (the
Manhattan Project, in particular), which became the model for techno-
logical research and innovation during the decades that followed. More
specifically, it was the mobilization of knowledge in the pursuit of a
better world that, paradoxically, has served to undermine the very
welfare state that gave birth to the teleological, self-interested, Web-
centered global crusade on which we have embarked.
What Are Industrial Revolutions?
The causes and consequences of the social, political, and economic

changes, and the seemingly continuous disorder and violence, both
interstate and intrastate, that wracked Europe between 1750 and 1850
remain the subject of vociferous controversy (see, e.g., Mann, 1993).
For some, it was the mechanization of industry—industrialization—
that was central; for others, it was the transition from merchant capi-
talism to manufacturing and finance capitalism. Still others have argued
that it was the destruction of the old post-Reformation hierarchical
order by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that was di-
rectly responsible for domestic and international disorder. In many
ways, the central contradiction facing the societies of the time was the
collapse of authority, as sovereign ruler gave way to sovereign people.
Polanyi’s argument was, however, somewhat more subtle than
this. He claimed that there was, in effect, a structural mismatch be-
tween the emerging system of liberal capitalism and then-existing social
values and social relations of production. The enormous investments
made in the new factory system by the holders of capital required
workers—primarily male, as women were expected to remain at home—
willing to work for wages. The workers were not willing to do so. At
the beginning of the nineteenth century, society was not organized so
as to facilitate the operation of an capitalist industrial system; labor,
land, and money were hedged about with all kinds of customary and
legal restrictions on use and sale. Indeed, the social organization of
16 Chapter 2
people’s lives was such that they had few incentives to leave the land
or enter unregulated labor markets. To be sure, the first stages of
capitalist production had already been in existence for some time,
especially where woven goods were concerned, but these were mostly
made through the cottage industry’s “putting-out” system, based in
weavers’ homes.
The marriage of water and steam power with such industry, dating
from the eighteenth century, made putting out and its social relations of
production obsolete. Now it was possible to run multiple looms at one
time in one place, with laborers working for a daily wage under the
direction of a few on-site managers. But factory owners faced a prob-
lem: How could they get male weavers out of their homes and into the
factories? The answer was, in effect, to undermine the social support
systems that made it possible for them to stay at home, an objective
accomplished through the introduction of a self-regulating market
economy—that is, liberalization. In such an economy, labor, land, and
money would be treated as what Polanyi called “fictitious commodities,”
to be bought and sold without any kind of obvious political manipula-
tion (although, to be implemented and made to work, such liberalization
required major intervention into society and regulation of social rela-
tions; see Gill, 1995:9). Deregulation would ensure availability of the
three commodities at least cost to capital and would, in turn, maximize
capitalists’ return on investment. It would also generate the funds needed
for further national economic expansion (for an exploration of this phe-
nomenon in a contemporary context, see Edmunds, 1996).
These were the circumstances under which the first stage of the
Great Transformation took place. England, which had operated under
principles of mercantilism for some 150 years, made the transition to
a self-regulating market system, free trade, and the gold standard
(Gilpin, 1977, 1987). Lands held as village commons or bound to
particular uses by customary rules were transformed into alienable
private property. (This process had begun in England some 150 years
earlier, and continues today. Enclosure was recently written into the
Mexican constitution with privatization of the ejidos; it is being ef-
fected through privatization of intellectual property rights; it is even
being applied in implementation of the UN Framework Convention on
Climate Change.) The Poor Laws, which had functioned to depress
wages and pauperize the common people, were repealed and replaced
by the “workhouse” and competitive labor markets that undermined

residual social solidarity.1 And free trade made it possible to import
cheap grains, which made food less costly and small-scale agriculture
unremunerative. Polanyi dated “industrial capitalism as a social sys-
tem” from 1834, the date of the Poor Law Reform. As he put it (1944/
1957:83), “[N]ow man was detached from home and kind, torn from
his roots and all meaningful environment.” What ensued was massive
social change. Karl Marx put it more poetically in 1856 (1978:577–
78), observing that “all that is solid melts into air” (the phrase also
appears in chapter 1 of The Communist Manifesto).
By mid-century, what had begun in England was being repeated
throughout much of Western and Central Europe and the Americas,
with attendant consequences (see, e.g., Berend and Ránki, 1979, esp.
9–120). Technological innovation in the wake of industrialization ex-
posed the inefficiencies of the old order and led to the political legis-
lation that reorganized social relations. But such reorganization was
not cost free to ruling elites; it threatened the social stability that had
been laboriously reestablished through repressive means and the bal-
ance of power after the Napoleonic Wars. The Concert of Europe was
able to keep interstate peace, more or less, but it was hard pressed to
address the domestic turmoil and disruption that followed social re-
structuring. The newly emerging middle classes, heretofore largely
excluded from political participation, saw their prospects under threat
and began to agitate for political and economic reform that would give
them both a say and a stake in the state. The Revolutions of 1848
were, in part, a result of this agitation; the repression that followed, a
response (Gerö, 1995).
Nationalism, and what later came to be called the welfare state,
emerged from this crisis as deliberate political interventions designed
to address both domestic political instability and challenges from
without. Together, the two could be seen as a form of “social contract,”
nationalism representing the commitment by the citizen to the well-
being of the state, welfarism the commitment by the state to the well-
being of the citizen (a point developed in chapter 6). To a considerable
degree, such mutual obligations helped to temper the social disruption
caused by the self-regulating market system.
But this contract also, according to Polanyi, set the scene for the
outbreak of World War I. The reason was that nationalism set states
18 Chapter 2
against one another, as emerging doctrines of geopolitics combined

with forms of Social Darwinism, rooted in Charles Darwin’s theories
of natural selection (but not advocated by Darwin himself), were ex-
tended from individual organisms as members of species to nations as
representations of superior races (Agnew and Corbridge, 1995:57). As
we shall see in chapter 5, according to German philosophers, who
elaborated the biological and evolutionary metaphor, states could be
seen as “natural” organisms that passed through specific stages of life.
Thus, younger, more energetic states inevitably succeeded older, geri-
atric ones on the world stage. States must therefore continually seek
individual advantage in order not to succumb prematurely to this cycle
of Nature (Dalby, 1990:35).
The point here is not that the first Industrial Revolution led,
ultimately, to the world wars of the twentieth century, although that is
one important aspect of Polanyi’s argument. Rather, it is that modern
capitalism was made feasible only through massive, social innovation
and reorganization (which are sometimes described as “strategies of
accumulation”) affecting Europe, North America, and much of the rest
of the world. When the first industrial entrepreneurs discovered that
they could not entice labor out of their homes and into the factories in
exchange for a full day’s pay, they found ways of rendering unviable
the family and social structures that, in the towns and villages, had
provided some degree of social support even in the midst of privation.
Then, workers had no choice but to go into the factories.
When later in the nineteenth century, agitation by workers over
low wages and undesirable working conditions led to the formation
of the first labor unions, which elites saw as a threat to their control
of state and economy (the “spectre haunting Europe”), new regula-
tions and incentives were put in place to, once again, foster a restruc-
turing of social units even while buffering labor and society against
some of the worst features of industrial capitalism. Nevertheless,
according to Polanyi, these were insufficient to maintain domestic
stability. Governments found it necessary to further protect their
citizens from the excesses of the system transmitted through the ups
and downs of the business cycle, increasingly competitive national
policies, and the surplus production capacity that in both the 1870s
and 1930s led to major world depressions. Governments responded
with growing degrees of protectionism, imperialism, and neomercan-
tilism. Competition and suspicion led to arms races and mutual hos-
tility. Eventually, wars broke out.
The Cold War Compromise
Polyani’s book was published in 1944, the year that Allied policymakers
gathered at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to put together their plan
for a postwar economic system (Block, 1977; Kapstein, 1996:20). These
men—and they were virtually all men, among whom were John
Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White—were well aware of the
history described by Polanyi. They recognized the inherent tension
between states trying to reconcile their participation in an international
economy with the need to maintain political satisfaction and stability
at home; this, after all, had been the dilemma faced by both Allied and
Axis powers during the 1930s. Hence, the economic system proposed
by Keynes, White, and others was designed to allow countries to
maintain full domestic employment and growth while simultaneously
avoiding the consequences for domestic stability of trade imbalances
and unregulated capital flows, along with semiliberalized trade to re-
duce the problem of surplus capacity (Gilpin, 1987). These goals were
to be accomplished through free and stable exchange rates maintained
by borrowing from and lending to an International Monetary Fund
(IMF), provision of longer-term liquidity through reconstruction and
development loans from the World Bank, free trade regulated by an
International Trade Organization (ITO), and dollar-gold convertibility
to provide an international medium of exchange (for discussions of the
Bretton Woods institutions and how they were meant to work, see
Block, 1977; Ruggie, 1983a, 1991, 1995).
The Bretton Woods arrangements failed almost from the start.
Efforts to restore convertibility of the pound sterling collapsed in the
face of Britain’s enormous wartime debts, insufficient global liquidity,
and the international preference for dollars. Convertibility was post-
poned. Both the IMF and World Bank were undercapitalized, too, and
the United States soon found it necessary to inject money into the in-
ternational economy through grants, loans, and military assistance, which
had its own negative consequences during the 1960s and 1970s in the
“Triffin Dilemma.”2 The ITO never came into existence, although the
20 Chapter 2
GATT provided something of a substitute until the establishment of

the World Trade Organization in 1995.
The compromise of “embedded liberalism,” as John Ruggie (1983a)
has called it, nonetheless remained on the books. Embedded liberalism
was based on a commitment by national governments to the principles
of nineteenth-century economic liberalism, with adequate safeguards
and the recognition that a rapid return to such a system might well
recreate the conditions of the 1930s. Inasmuch as full-blown liberaliza-
tion was politically impossible in 1944, the Western allies agreed to
move over time in the direction of a fully liberal system. There would
be a gradual transition from a more protectionist and neomercantilist
world to a more liberal one, in which “self-regulating markets” would
be phased in through negotiations among states.3
As the dollar liquidity shortage began to bite toward the end of
the 1940s, this more-or-less implicit agreement was greased by financial
transfers through the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Korean
War, and the Mutual Defense Act (see Pollard, 1985; the Mutual Defense
Agency subsequently became the U.S. Agency for International Devel-
opment, which, in 1998, was transformed into a wholly owned subsid-
iary of the U.S. Department of State). Full convertibility of Western
currencies finally arrived in 1958, and successive GATT rounds served
to dismantle many of the protectionist barriers that had been put up in
the aftermath of World War II. Still, full-blown international liberalism
was not yet in sight.
Although it is generally argued that the purpose of the Cold War
liberalization project was both defensive and economic (as the conven-
tional and revisionist accounts would have it), this is not quite correct.4
Rather, the intention of U.S. policy was to reproduce domestic Ameri-
can society (or, at least, its underlying structural conditions), as much
as possible, the world over. The implicit reasoning behind this goal,
although specious and faulty, was that stability and prosperity in the
United States were made possible by capitalism, democracy, growth,
freedom, and social integration. If such conditions could be replicated
in other countries, everyone would become like the happy Americans
(Packenham, 1973; see also Lederer and Burdick, 1958). They would
not threaten each other, they would not fight each other, and the num-
ber of twentieth-century world wars would be limited to two.5 Whether
or not the USSR, the Warsaw Pact, and miscellaneous radical regimes
throughout the developing world posed a mortal threat to this project

is largely irrelevant. The very existence of the Soviet bloc provided an
external enemy that motivated fractious allies to compromise on lib-
eralization (and defense), even when it was not to everyone’s taste or
benefit.
This ambitious project of liberalization from above came to an
end in the late 1960s. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the economy
of the free world was greased mostly by the dollars that the United
States was able to spend abroad or transfer to its allies. The export of
dollars helped to maintain high levels of international liquidity and
growth, which was to America’s benefit. Already in the late 1950s, as
noted earlier, Robert Triffin had warned that this state of affairs could
not continue indefinitely. Other countries’ need for additional dollars
would eventually reach a limit. They might then demand gold in ex-
change, more gold than the United States had squirreled away in Fort
Knox.6 The expenditures associated with the Vietnam War only has-
tened the day when the dollar-gold exchange standard would have to
end. That day arrived in 1971 (Gowa, 1983).
Not altogether coincidentally, it was during this same period that
President Nixon enunciated his eponymous doctrine, which promised
to place greater reliance on U.S. allies to maintain regional stability
and security. Nixon and Kissinger meant to get the United States out
of Vietnam but the Nixon Doctrine had wider implications, too. In the
future, countries would be expected to provide for their own defense
rather than relying on the United States, although the latter would
gladly sell to the former the armaments needed for this purpose. It was
also during these years that the oil-producing countries finally began
to demand higher prices for their product, so that they could purchase
the weapons and technology needed to implement the doctrine. The oil
embargoes, price hikes, gas lines, and inflation that followed were all
of a piece (Schurmann, 1974, 1987; Saul, 1992).
The Third Industrial Revolution
These events, and those that followed later, might not have been the
most important happenings during the 1960s and 1970s. There was
another, much more subtle process underway whose significance had
22 Chapter 2
not yet been noticed fully, but whose origins could be traced back to
the 1940s: the Third Industrial Revolution, or what is often called
today the “information” or “electronics revolution.” This latest great
transformation is usually ascribed to the invention of the transistor and
the enormous increases in computing speed and capability that fol-
lowed as more and more semiconductor devices could be crammed
into smaller and smaller spaces. But the information revolution is
better understood not as a cause of that innovation but rather as a
consequence of fundamental innovation in the social organization of
scientific research and development and higher education that began
during World War II.
Prior to 1945, the economic systems of the industrialized coun-
tries were organized around consumer-oriented mass production, or
“Fordism” (Rupert, 1995). Fordist production, characteristic of the
Second Industrial Revolution, was especially widespread in the United
States during the first half of the twentieth century, and well into the
second half. It came to be emulated throughout the world, although it
faltered during the Great Depression as the supply of manufactured
goods and raw materials outstripped the demand of domestic and for-
eign consumers. The Allied victory in World War II was based on
Fordist mass production, which only reinforced the virtues of this type
of economy (Milward, 1977; Rochlin, 1985; for an argument that
military Fordism is over, see Cohen, 1996). Subsequently, at the end
of World War II, factories converted back to civilian production and,
after a few ups and downs of the business cycle, Keynesian military
spending helped to ensure that consumers would be able to purchase
the products turned out by the factories with the wages they earned
making the goods.
What changed? In 1945, Bernard Brodie made the observation
that, with the advent of nuclear weapons, everything had changed. The
only function of the military, he said, would now be to prevent future
wars (quoted in Freedman, 1983:44). Brodie was only half right; the
bomb changed much more than he thought. Neither he nor anyone else
recognized then that the development of the atomic bomb also sig-
naled the beginning of the end for Fordism, marked by a subtle shift
from production based on material capabilities to a system driven by
intellectual ones. The advent of the information revolution coincided
with the origins of the “nuclear revolution” and, indeed, was inherent
in it. The change did not come suddenly; just as the First Industrial
Revolution had its roots in steam technology that was developed de-
cades before 1800 and coexisted for some time with the putting-out
system, and the Second in electricity and electrification of factories, so
did Fordism continue to thrive even as it was becoming obsolete.
For example, thinking that numbers would make the difference
in World War III as they had in World War II, the initial American
approach to defense and deterrence was to mass-produce enormous
numbers of atomic and hydrogen bombs (some twenty-five thousand
by the end of the 1950s) so as to bomb Russia to rubble. As time
passed, however, it became obvious that total war with nuclear weap-
ons might not be such a good idea. Most of the nuclear deterrence and
arms-control debates of the following forty years pitted those advocat-
ing mass use of force (mutually assured destruction, or MAD) against
those arguing for niche-targeted “finesse” (MIRVing and counterforce
targeting; see Freedman, 1983).
The mass production approach to war was obsolete almost as
soon as the dust cleared over Hiroshima, but it had yet to be fully
applied to science (although it was already being applied in some
sectors; see, e.g., Burnham, 1941). In the aftermath of the successes of
the Manhattan Project and other state-funded wartime projects, this
new model of scientific research and production emerged, organized
around “human capital.” Technological change and social innovation
once again came into play in the service of the state.7 Science became
highly institutionalized. Directed research and development became
critical to maintaining the United States’ technological and military
edge over its competitors. Education of the workforce in the intellec-
tual tools and skills of this new world became essential. Education
itself was transformed, as it became clear that traditional rote learn-
ing—reading, writing, and ’rithmetic—was appropriate to creating a
“cannon-fodder” citizenry for the mass armies of world wars I and II,
but would not produce the critically and scientifically trained cadres
needed in this new era of U.S.-directed global management.
In response, over the following decades, the American system of
higher education expanded manyfold. In the 1960s, University of
California President Clark Kerr called the new model the “multiver-
sity”; others ridiculed it as the “educational cafeteria.” No matter;
specializations proliferated. A college degree became a prerequisite to
24 Chapter 2
advancement and mobility out of the working class and into the
“middle” class (aided and abetted in this by the GI Bill, Pell Grants,
and other forms of educational “credit”). And, because intellectual
ability and competence were not distributed by class, race, or gender,
it also became necessary to provide access to these opportunities to
women as well as minorities.8
Finally, just as had been the case in earlier times, the programs
of the leading country were adopted by others (Gerschenkron, 1962;
Crawford, 1995). The growth in numbers of educated cadres was not
limited to the United States, because the American university model
was universalized. Foreigners were encouraged to come to the United
States to acquire the skills and training necessary to rationalize their
own societies and make them more like America.9 Their way and
tuition were often paid by the U.S. government as, for instance, in the
“Atoms for Peace” program. Other countries recognized the prestige
and political benefits inherent in systems of higher education, as well
as their need for trained individuals so that they could compete in this
new global system. They built national university systems, too.
The Revolution at Home
Left to its own devices, the information revolution might have gone
nowhere. Just as in the absence of the impetus of markets and profits,
the steam engine would have remained a curiosity with limited appli-
cation, so were the dynamic of capitalism combined with political and
economic instability required to really get this latest industrial revolu-
tion off the ground. That these elements were necessary to the new
regime of accumulation (if not essential) is best seen in the trajectory
and fate of the Soviet Union. The USSR was able to engineer the first
steps of the transformation and acquire advanced military means com-
parable in most respects to the West’s,10 but eventually it was unable
to engage in the social innovation necessary to reorganize the produc-
tive process and maintain growth rates (Crawford, 1995).
In the United States, the education of cadres of citizens during
the Cold War, the erosion of the political legitimacy of the state, and
public protests during the 1960s were key parts of the process of social
reorganization. The slow decline of American economic dominance
was another. The political upheavals of the 1960s had their origins in
the extension of American national interest to all parts of the globe
during the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the growth of higher education.
The expansion of interests meant that specialized knowledge about
foreign societies, and their cultures, politics, and economics, were
essential if the “free world” were to be managed for the benefit of the
United States. The “old boy” banker-lawyer network that had supplied
diplomats and specialist throughout much of the twentieth century
(Barnet, 1973) could no longer meet the demand. The result was a
system dedicated to production of specially trained individuals, who
could deal with foreign affairs and comparative politics, to staff em-
bassies, the State Department, and other agencies, at home and abroad.
And, as I noted above, the emergence of a scientific problem–solving
paradigm as the dominant model for managing of the new global
system also generated the need for large numbers of individuals trained
in a variety of scientific disciplines. Growing numbers of highly skilled
individuals were thus trained, with the expectation that they would
participate in projects addressing social as well as scientific matters.11
But what would happen to these educated elites after college? In
many countries, including the United States, new college graduates
expected to find employment with their own national and state govern-
ments, state-owned and defense-related private industries, or systems
of secondary or higher education. For some decades, there was a bal-
ance between graduates and jobs, supported by relatively steady eco-
nomic growth rates. At some point, however, the supply of competent
individuals began to exceed the official demand for their skills (Arenson,
1998). Moreover, as the failure in Vietnam demonstrated during the
1960s and 1970s, even the government’s mobilization of expertise in
the pursuit of national security objectives did not always turn out
successfully.
One result of the Vietnam fiasco was a serious challenge to the
legitimacy of Cold War politics; another was the breaking open of the
culture of expertise, with all of its hegemonic restrictions on opposi-
tion to the “dominant paradigm” (Barnet, 1973). Competing centers of
expertise, skills, and knowledge began to surface, epitomized in the
global proliferation of “think tanks” and nongovernmental organiza-
tions of the right and left. These centers came to represent a system
of analytical capabilities, knowledge, and practice parallel to that of
26 Chapter 2
the state’s, providing gainful employment to many “symbolic analysts,”

as Robert Reich (1992) has called them, at all levels of society, and a
series of way stations to those who might wish to move in and out of
government positions. Indeed, it is somewhat paradoxical that, even as
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was increasingly excoriated for its
domestic policy failures, conservative and liberal think tanks were only
too happy to rush in with new, usually untested policy advice.
Into the Breach
Thus, the international political and economic turmoil of the 1970s—

the collapse of the Bretton Woods currency exchange system, oil
embargo and price hikes, recession, inflation, and implementation of
the Nixon Doctrine (Schurmann, 1987)—provided the initial impetus
to innovation and reorganization in industry and production. Among
the effects were the shift from large, gas-guzzling cars to smaller,
more fuel-efficient foreign ones—a trend now being reversed with the
shift to SUVs as a result of extremely low oil prices—a greater reli-
ance on market mechanisms to generate supplies of raw materials, and
the emergence of what came to be called the “new international divi-
sion of labor.” Of comparable importance in this transition were the
growing social costs of the welfare state, which capital saw as a drag
on profits, and an emerging attack on the “liberal” American govern-
ment by Cold War conservatives. The fact that some of America’s
allies and client states had successfully followed, and in some cases
surpassed, the leader in terms of technological and social innovation
was also crucial. This last change should not have come as a surprise,
but it did. (Indeed, it is important to recognize that the postwar reor-
ganization and economic development of Japan and Germany repre-
sented major successes of U.S. foreign policy!)
Reestablishing growth rates and profits, suppressing inflation, and
restoring economic management required a reorganization of social
relations and relations of production, although this was not so evident
in the 1970s and 1980s; moreover, what followed was certainly not
carefully planned. Nonetheless, one result of this change was that
growing numbers of women and minorities began to enter the U.S.
workforce. Not only did they need the money—incomes were subject
to high rates of inflation during the 1970s, came under growing pres-
sure as the 1981–82 recession began to bite, and grew more slowly
between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s than during the 1950s and
1960s—they also commanded lower wages relative to white men.
Moreover, as they acquired heretofore unheard-of purchasing power
women and minorities turned out to be good marketing tools and
consumers for corporations seeking new markets (Elliott, 1997). Alter-
native lifestyles and new family structures became necessary and ac-
ceptable, in part because of social innovation, in part for economic
reasons. As a result, gays and lesbians came out in growing numbers
and they, too, offered an attractive niche market toward which capital
could target new products and services.
By the beginning of the 1980s, this transformation was in full
swing, and so was the reaction against it. The conservatism of Ronald
Reagan and his supporters is best understood as a backlash against the
cultural and social change fostered by social innovation and reorgani-
zation, but it is difficult to argue that the Reaganauts did anything to
slow it down. To the contrary: Reagan’s economic policies were de-
signed to shrink the welfare state and squeeze inflation out of the
economy but they had a quite unintended effect on American society
and the rest of the world. The 1982–83 recession reduced inflation but
was devastating for Rust Belt “metal-bashing” industries—the core of
Fordist production—in the United States and abroad.
Liberalization, deindustrialization, privatization of the state, and
the rise of finance capital actually worked to undermine families. Self-
interest became the sure path to success, and parents and children
were inculcated with a “what’s in it for me?” sensibility. The road to
profit was clearly marked, and did not involve the fostering of any
sense of social or even familial solidarity. Spatial mobility was the key
to upward mobility and, for some, the traditional nuclear family be-
came an albatross. Adam Smith believed in the power of the “invisible
hand,” but he had also expected that religious and social values would
restrain people from uncontrollable self-interest (Coats, 1971, cited in
Hirsch, 1995:137). Smith never reckoned with mass secularization,
rampant consumerism, and the social indifference the morality of the
market might foster.
Pat Buchanan’s “culture war,” declared from the podium of the
Republican National Convention in 1992, should have come as no
28 Chapter 2
surprise to anyone; the conflict had been brewing for years (Lind,
1991; see also Lipschutz, 1998b; Rupert, 1997). What was ironic,
perhaps, was that Buchanan and his colleagues blamed political “lib-
erals,” rather than hyperliberal capitalism, for the problems they saw
destroying American society.12 To have put the blame on the real cause
would have been to reveal to the listening public that the new eco-
nomic system is not—indeed, cannot be—fair to everyone, and that
those who begin with advantages will virtually always retain them
(Hirsch, 1995).13 Admitting such a contradiction would be to repeat
the fatal mistake of Mikhail Gorbachev, when he announced that the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union was no longer the vanguard of
socialist truth: Attack the legitimacy of your social system’s ideology,
and there is no end to the destruction that might follow (Lipschutz,
1998b). It might happen, anyway, if the parallels between today and
Polanyi’s Great Transformation are germane.
There are three notable similarities between the two “transforma-
tions.” First, although it can hardly be said that there was a welfare
state in England in 1800, there did exist various forms of social sup-
port for the poor. These, as Polanyi and others pointed out, served to
depress wages to the benefit of capital and also, it was argued, made
it more attractive for people to go on relief than to work (Himmelfarb,
1995)—arguments that sound eerily familiar today.
Second, the privatization of various forms of public property and
commons, which had also provided a resource buffer for the rural
poor, was deemed necessary to foster wider markets and provide the
labor pool necessary for industrialism to develop. There are not many
peasants left in the United States, but the downsizing and the disman-
tling of the state, and the drive to make corporations meaner, leaner,
and more profitable, have eliminated large parts of the social safety net
and job security, both of which could be thought of as a form of
common-pool property right guaranteed to workers. The result has
been to inject large numbers of college-educated but no longer appro-
priately skilled mid-level, middle-aged managers and civil servants
into what is already a highly competitive labor market. This is a market
in which much job creation is either in the lower-wage service sector
or in areas, such as writing software code, requiring knowledge the
newly unemployed do not possess and could acquire only with great
difficulty and considerable expense.
Third, “opportunity only knocks once.” As people find it neces-

sary to move to where the jobs and money are, other considerations
come second. High spatial mobility weakens families, ties to commu-
nities, and such other social-support systems as still exist in this coun-
try. Like the fabled elders left behind on ice flows by the Inuit, those
who cannot move may be left behind or thrown into public shelters or
out on the streets.
Another interesting, but possibly more significant, parallel to the
Great Transformation is the creation of new fictitious commodities
akin to Polanyi’s labor, land, and money. The first is embodied in the
concept of human capital (or “human resources,” as it is more prosai-
cally known). During the First Industrial Revolution, people found it
necessary to sell their physical strength to capital and, during the
second, their manual skills. Now, a premium is placed on intellectual
strengths and capabilities and an individual’s ability to process and
package information in ways that can be commodified and sold for
premium prices.
The second fictitious commodity is information, which has been
transformed from a common-pool resource into “intellectual property”
whose ownership is hedged all about with legal restrictions. While
information and knowledge have long been bought, exchanged, and
stolen, these activities have usually occurred in concert with the pro-
duction and consumption of material goods. Today, however, even raw
data on individual habits and behavior can be turned into proprietary
information and sold. Sometimes, the very methods by which people
accomplish their everyday objectives are gathered, processed, and re-
sold to them (Have you used your supermarket club card lately?).14
Finally, the third fictitious commodity is the vast expansion in
consumer credit, or what we might call “virtual money,” available
primarily to those who are most likely to use it. Whereas the moneti-
zation of the English economy was a necessary prerequisite to under-
mining barter and direct exchange of goods, the creation of virtual
money eliminates even the need for face-to-face transactions, inherent
value in coinage, or the guarantee of legal tender by governments.
Such funds appear virtually ex nihilo as physical and intellectual prop-
erties are securitized, as stocks rise on the strength of no apparent
material causes, and as individual credit lines are magically increased
through the daily mail.15
30 Chapter 2
Of course, not everybody is automatically eligible to participate

in this new system of fictitious commodities. Many lack the required
property or income qualifications to gain access. But as Stephen Gill
(1995:22) has pointed out, such access is a prerequisite for citizenship
in contemporary liberal democracy:
[T]he substantive conception of citizenship involves not only a

political-legal conception, but also an economic idea. Full citizen-
ship requires not only a claim of political rights and obligations,
but access to and participation in a system of production and
consumption.
Beginning in adolescence, he argues, this acts to discipline and social-

ize consumers. Failure to meet the terms of economic citizenship,
through late payments or bankruptcy, means social marginalization.
The threat of exclusion keeps consumers in line. The result, says Gill,
is the replacement of “traditional forms of discipline associated with
the family and the school” with “market discipline” (1995:26; see also
Drainville, 1995). In this way, the workers of the world of the future
are bound into domination by the new global economy (points that are
further elaborated in chapters 7 and 8).
Whether this Third Industrial Revolution has yet reached its apogee
is anybody’s guess (Paul Krugman has suggested that it will take at
least fifty years to mature fully; 1994a:28–29). Two points, however,
are clear. First, the social innovation and reorganization that has under-
mined the older material basis of American society—and much of the
rest of the world, as well—cannot be halted on command. Contempo-
rary change is a global phenomenon that some societies are carrying
out more efficiently and equitably than others, but to quit the race
would be to return to some form of neomercantilism and severe eco-
nomic contraction at home and abroad, and this would play well nei-
ther in Peoria nor on Wall Street.
Second, this Great Transformation is likely to be as severe as, if
not worse than, the one that wracked Britain in the first part of the
nineteenth century. Not everyone will suffer equally, of course, or
suffer at all, for that matter. Just as some did extremely well by the
First and Second Industrial Revolutions, so will many benefit from this
one. A global class of the better-off (numbering perhaps 1 billion, if
that many) and a global class of the poor (as many as 8 to 10 billion)
will emerge. Many members of the better-off class will reside in what
today we call “developing countries”; a not considerable number of
the poor will live in the “industrialized ones.” If things work out, by
the middle of the twenty-first century we might even see a global
middle class that will provide bourgeois support for this new global
order and, perhaps, demand some form of representative global de-
mocratization (see chapter 8). Then, again, we might not.
Spare Change in World Politics
What are the implications of these changes for state, society, citizen
and security? The answers to this question are treated in the following
chapters. In one sense, the realist mantra—“The world is a dangerous
place”—is correct. Life is full of risks, and it always ends in death.
There may well be an asteroid somewhere out in space with Earth’s
name written on it. But we should always ask Dangerous for whom?
Perhaps the world is dangerous, especially for those who would ma-
nipulate people and politics in pursuit of individual self-interest. We
see an example of this in another literary classic, a work of fiction
(even though it was not quite meant as a fiction when published in
1962). Toward the end of Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Cold
War novel Fail Safe, the president’s advisor on nuclear strategy, Harvard
professor Walter Groteschele (modeled on Henry Kissinger, among
others), contemplates his prospects after the thermonuclear annihila-
tion of Moscow and New York City (a catastrophe due, in no small
part, to his notions of danger in the world). Foreseeing the likelihood
of an end to the arms race between the two superpowers (whose dan-
ger has made him so prominent and well-off),
Groteschele swung his attention to what his future work would be.
If there were drastic cutbacks in military expenditures many busi-
nesses would be seriously affected; some of them would even be
ruined. A man who understood government and big political move-
ments could make a comfortable living advising the threatened in-
dustries. It was a sound idea, and Groteschele tucked it away in his
mind with a sense of reassurance. (Burdick and Wheeler, 1962:272)
32 Chapter 2
The postwar project of economic globalization has, perhaps unin-

tentionally, shifted the discursive locus of sovereignty, security, and peace
from the state to the individual. The state retains a dominant position in
terms of military force, economic management, and so on, but for capi-
talism to grow successfully beyond the bounds of national markets and
become truly global, social innovation must be allowed to take place
across all kinds of borders. This can happen only if individuals (and the
corporations and organizations they represent and populate) are allowed
untrammeled access to all parts of the world and can be assured that
they will not be expelled, thrown into jail, or killed if they wander across
both figurative and literal borders. Not all governments follow this line,
but global innovation is likely to bypass those that don’t. Places that, for
one reason or another, find themselves excluded from this process of
globalization are also strong candidates for recidivism, revanchism, and
reaction. The former Yugoslavia and Myannmar are good examples
(Lipschutz and Crawford, 1996; Gagnon, 1995).
Even those in the thick of globalization, and reaping extensive
benefits from it, are not very comfortable with its implications. The
movement of peoples across borders in the interest of social innovation
provides entry not only to those seeking work, but some who might have
other agendas, too. As we saw in the reactions to the Oklahoma City
bombing in 1995 and the crash of TWA Flight 800 in July 1996, the
initial impulse was to blame bombs and missiles in the hands of “for-
eign terrorists,” although subsequent evidence indicates this not to have
been the case in either (Lipschutz, 1999b). Nevertheless, as countries
lose sovereign control over their borders and the possibility of managing
the movement of people, goods, and ideas, they seem to be focusing
more closely on the new subjects of transnational sovereignty, the indi-
viduals, in the hope that keeping a watchful eye on such free subjects
will serve also to discipline them (Gill, 1995; see also chapter 7). This
is, most probably, a vain hope: people are very clever, and only the
inept—who are not very dangerous—usually get caught.
If (Cold) War made the state, and the state made (Cold) War, to
paraphrase sociologist Charles Tilly, what is the state to do now?
Some ultracompetitive entrepreneurs suggest that “business is war”
and, so, we might have to rethink Tilly’s dictum. Wars are a messy
business, and it might be prudent to clean them up. That effort is well
under way.
3❖
THE INSECURITY DILEMMA
What is “security?” What does it mean to be “secure?” Who or what

secures us? And why do we feel so insecure? Security demands cer-
tainty; to be uncertain about the present and future is to be insecure
about them, as well. We try to reduce or eliminate uncertainties in
order to become more secure. But risk analysts often tell us that the
cost of eliminating a risk is infinite, which suggests that we can never
be fully secure. Security is, therefore, something of a chimera, inas-
much as only the dead can be absolutely sure that nothing about their
condition will change (and even then, the promises of Christian
millennialism auger some uncertainty about that future).
For many, particularly in the United States, the absence of a
coherent, concentrated threat or enemy seems to have become espe-
cially troubling (Huntington, 1997). The president and Pentagon warn
darkly of surrounding dangers (Clinton, 1997). Some describe coming
conflicts with non-Western civilizations (Huntington, 1996); others fear
the collapse of pivotal states (Chase, Hill, and Kennedy, 1996); a
growing number see in China a challenger to U.S. dominance (Bernstein
and Munro, 1997). Environmental degradation and economic change
are deemed to be security “threats,” while hackers and pornographers
lurk in cyberspace, ready to steal information and poison young minds.
33
34 Chapter 3
The boy or girl next door could cut our throats, as we are told in films
and articles “based on true stories.” Diseases are poised to escape from
disappearing tropical forests, flying out on the next 757, to be depos-
ited in the midst of urban insurrections. Drugs, illegal immigrants, and
terrorists are everywhere. And a few far-sighted individuals (and film
producers) even tell us that, somewhere out in distance space, there is
a comet or asteroid with Earth’s name on it. The universe of threats
seems infinite; the only limit is our imagination (Foster 1994; Kugler,
1995).
Why so many threats? Although a decade has passed since the
“end” of the Cold War, the basic premises of U.S. national security
policy remain uncertain, ill-defined, and contested. Despite the precise
language of President Clinton’s National Security Strategy (1997; see
chapter 4), no consensual agreement on the nature or source of present
or future threats has developed; no comprehensive strategy akin to
containment has emerged; no stable policies regarding force structures
and deployments have been formulated (Levin, 1994). The U.S. de-
fense budget continues to grow, albeit more slowly than in the 1980s,
but who is the target? NATO expands, but who is the enemy? The
world of 170 states on the march against each other is a nostalgic
memory; who or what now threatens to stalk us? And why, even though
we are, in many ways, more secure than we have been for fifty years—
especially with a decline in the probability of large-scale nuclear war—
does the search for security continue, more frantically and, some might
argue, more fruitlessly, than ever? Is it a failure of policy, or a flaw in
reasoning?
We face, in short, an insecurity dilemma. Forty years ago, John
Herz (1959) formulated the idea of the “security dilemma,” a concept
later picked up and further developed by Robert Jervis (1978). Both
argued that many of the ostensibly defensive actions taken by states to
make themselves more secure—development of new military tech-
nologies, accumulation of weapons, mobilization of troops—had the
effect of making neighboring states less secure. There was no way of
knowing whether the intentions behind military deployments were
defensive or offensive; hence, it was better to be safe and assume the
worst. The result was, in many instances, an arms spiral, as each side
tried to match the acquisitions of its neighbor.1 While there were con-
tinual arguments over whether security policy should be based on
The Insecurity Dilemma 35
observable capabilities—what the other side could do—or on intent—

what the other side meant to do—there was, minimally, a material
basis for arriving at assessments, whether correct or not.
Today, the basis for assessing threats and potential consequences
is of a quite different character, for three fundamental reasons. First,
those structural features of international politics that constrained and
directed security policies and practices between 1947 and 1991 have
vanished, even as most of the institutions and many of the capabilities
associated with the Cold War remain in place. Institutions can find
new ontologies, from which will follow policies, but these must have
some fit to new political configurations or they will lose their legiti-
macy. Thus, we have NATO trying on a variety of new missions with-
out being quite sure of their purpose. Is NATO to remain a security
“blanket” for an expanded Western Europe, on standby against the
possibility of a newly aggressive and imperial Russia (as many think
was the purpose of inclusion of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech
Republic)? Is it to become a security “regime,” encompassing all of
Europe, as well as North America and the former Soviet republics,
intended to provide psychotherapy for aggrieved countries and na-
tions? Can it best function as a security “maker,” uniting its forces, as
over Kosovo, to intervene in ethnic and other conflicts that, many fear,
could undermine European stability? Or, should it concentrate on
deterring the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in the hands
of “rogues” and “terrorists” (Erlanger, 1998)? In the end, the absence
of what seems to be clear and definable threats leads to the “hammer-
nail” conundrum: you fit the task to the tools rather than first defining
the task and then choosing the tools.2
Second, the disappearance of nuclear bipolarity and the “Great
Transformation” set in train by the Cold War have led individuals and
groups to recover and re-articulate various frameworks of belief and
practice, or “historical structures” (to use Robert Cox’s term; Cox,
1987), that create enemies where they did not exist before. The result
is the institutionalization of uncertainty, even in parts of the world that,
for decades, seemed quite fixed and stable. Thus, speculate some ana-
lysts, civil conflict in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, and others
would not have broken out had the Cold War not come to an end
(leading some, such as John J. Mearsheimer, to predict that “we will
soon miss the Cold War”; Mearsheimer, 1990a). As we shall see in
36 Chapter 3
chapter 6, the working assumption of such analyses is that these wars

are, somehow, premodern or primordial, afflicting only places not fully
socialized into twentieth-century modernity, and that such violence
was prevented prior to 1989 by the pressures imposed on those coun-
tries by the United States and the Soviet Union. But it is also quite
possible that such bloodlettings are very postmodern (see, e.g., Beck,
1992:9–16). Consequently, we might behold the futures of global
politics in both the European Union as well as in the world’s chaotic
places. As globalization works its way on self, state, and society, we
may see the emergence of the “insecurity dilemma” at the social level,
rather than between the black-box states of classical realist politics.
Finally, the anchors that once permitted self-reflective collectivi-
ties to fortify themselves and their friends from foes and threats are
decomposing, making it ever more difficult to specify which self is to
be made secure from what threat. A proliferation of new identities—
as states, as cultures, as ethnies, as individuals—indicate that funda-
mental units of global political interaction have been destabilized,
thereby rendering problematic the finding of new anchorages on which
to base stable political relations. What is the political structure of a
confrontation between Microsoft or Boeing and the European Union
(Strange, 1996)? Can computer hackers wage war against the Penta-
gon? Could every (wo)man be a country, if not an island?3 Such ques-
tions are not meant to lead to dictums such as “the state is obsolete,”
or “interdependence confounds sovereignty.” Rather, it is to suggest
that the boundaries that, for forty-odd years, disciplined states and
polities no longer do so. To rephrase Yeats’ oft-cited line, it is not that
the center cannot hold; rather, it is that the margins cannot be con-
tained. And make no mistake, new margins are emerging everywhere,
even in the center (Luke, 1995; Enzenberger, 1994).
The disintegration of conceptual containers gets only at the ide-
ational core of the insecurity dilemma. Material processes have their
consequences, too, and in today’s world, the struggle over security
also arises from another phenomenon: changes in the material consti-
tution of the state itself. Under the pressures of globalization and other
systemic forces discussed in chapter 2, the state is being transformed
into something different from what it was, even in the recent past. To
make this new object “secure” implies different constructions of both
threat and security than those with which we are familiar from the past
fifty years. Under fluid conditions such as this, the very act of defining
security becomes the subject of struggle, providing not only access to
material resources and authority but also the opportunity to establish
new boundaries of discourse and research (Thompson, 1979; Lipschutz,
1999a). Those who win the debate win more than just the prize, for
they also get to mark those boundaries. Those who find themselves left
outside have not only lost the game, they have been banished from
politics, made outsiders. They may even become the new enemy.
Ultimately, it would seem, the only boundary that is truly secure is the
one drawn around the self—and even this is open to doubt—which
suggests that security is more than just a material condition, and that
insecurity might just be a fact of life. Such insecurity is not to be
confused with Hobbes’ State of Nature, however; rather, it is a condi-
tion associated with uncertainty, difference, and individuation, as we
shall see.
In this chapter, I address the twin problems of security and inse-
curity. I begin with a discussion of the end of the national security
state, pointing out how U.S. Cold War policy undermined the very
security system meant to protect the West during that period. I then
turn to what I call the “insecurity dilemma” and ask why, if the level
of global threats has diminished, do societies feel so insecure? Pace
Herz, Jervis, and others, the insecurity dilemma arises not from threats
but from difference. In the third section of this chapter, I discuss how
threats are constructed, and by whom. Finally, I conclude by arguing
that we would do better to come to grips with insecurity and difference
than to try to eliminate all those things we believe might threaten us
because they are different and make us feel insecure.
The End of the National Security State?
It has become fashionable (once again!) to say that “states no longer

matter” (Ohmae, 1991; 1995). Borders are porous—if they are there at
all—and people, capital, goods, and information flow across them with
both alacrity and disdain for political authorities.4 The result, some
argue, must be productive of peace and harmonious relations among
people, as they become comfortable with and trusting of one another
through growing familiarity and similarity (an idea first proposed by
38 Chapter 3
Norman Angell in 1910; see Angell, 1910). There is a contrary school

of thought that insists that states still do matter, more than ever, and
that they will be with us for decades, if not centuries and longer, to
come. Flows across borders do not foster peace and understanding; if
anything, they illustrate just how different societies really are and how
few interests they have in common. The result, argue such contrarians,
is likely to be increased friction, and even war.5
As is often the case, neither side in the debate has asked or
answered the correct question. Moreover, advocates of both versions
tend to reify the state, either in terms of its growing weakness or
growing power. Consequently, there are only two “states” of the state,
as it were: here or gone, on or off. But the state of the state is hardly
a binary condition. Political comparativists never tire of pointing out
that what international relations scholars and diplomats call “states”
represent, in fact, a wide variety of political forms with an incredible
diversity of domestic structures and actors (Jackson, 1990; Inayatullah,
1996). And as sociologists and others often suggest, states are, after
all, made up of people acting alone and together in the pursuit of many
different goals. Frequently, these goals are contradictory, and the group
that “wins” is the one better able to bring to bear its power and capa-
bilities in relevant fora (Smithson, 1996). To the extent that such ef-
forts succeed in narrowing down the range of critical issues facing
state and society, it may be possible to say that the state still “matters”
in one realm or another (as we shall see, below).6
National security is often taken to be a matter where the state
does matter: The survival of the state—and, by extension, society—is
paramount. Consequently, where security is concerned the state must
take the lead because no other institution, whether domestic or inter-
national, can provide comparable amounts of this “public good” to a
specific polity. Therefore, the state continues to be important in at least
this one realm—or so it is said. The flaw in this argument is that the
need or demand for security is not fixed over time or across issue areas
or, indeed, the same for all of the individuals and collectives that
constitute a state’s society.
During periods of high international tension, whether real or imag-
ined, the state can force the priority of security policy; the argument that
state and society might vanish under external onslaught carries consid-
erable weight. Under other conditions, making such an argument is
much more difficult. Some scholars of foreign policy, such as Graham
Allison (1971) and John Steinbruner (1974), argued this point more than
twenty-five years ago, articulating theories of “bureaucratic politics,”
“high politics” versus “low politics,” and “cybernetic decision-making,”
in order to explain the resolution of national security crises. A constant
in all of these offerings was, however, that the state was central to the
conceptualization of threats, formulation of responses, and implementa-
tion of security policy. It was also the primary object of that policy.7 In
keeping with the search for universal laws and theories, as proposed by
Hans Morgenthau and others in the discipline, the basic principles were
broadly assumed to be true over both space and time.
Yet, if we look at the state as an institution that has changed over
time, and continues to change, we discover that such formulations obscure
more than they reveal. Today’s “Great Powers” often have the same names
as those of a century ago, and they are located in more-or-less the same
places (although a few have shifted eastward or westward). We would
nonetheless be hard put to argue that, in spite of historical and geographic
continuity, they are the same. Changes have taken place not only in do-
mestic politics and the external environment, but also in the relationship
between citizen and state and in the very constitution and identity of the
citizen herself (Drainville, 1995; Gill, 1995). Such changes fundamentally
alter both the national and international political environments in which
state, society, and self exist, thereby rendering most discussions of
“redefining security” almost beside the point.8
What is lacking in these old and new analytical frameworks? To
repeat a point made earlier, conventional perspectives on national se-
curity ignore a critical existential factor: The state, as well as the
threats it faces and the security policies that result, are mental as well
as material constructs (Buzan, 1991; Lipschutz, 1989). That is to say,
the reproduction of the intellectual and emotional logics of the state
and its need for security against “enemies” is as important to national
security as the production of the technology, soldiers, and military
hardware that are meant to provide the physical infrastructure of pro-
tection (Huntington, 1997). As the collapse of the Soviet Union indi-
cated, even a materially powerful and evidently secure state can be
undermined if the mental constructs supporting it come under sus-
tained pressure, both domestic and international (Crawford, 1995).
Indeed, it might be that, of all types of states extant in the world, it is
the national security state that is most likely to be affected by the
erosion of these nonmaterial constructs.
40 Chapter 3
What, then, is the national security state (NSS)? The NSS is best
understood as a particular type of institution whose origins are found
in the logics of the Industrial Revolution and the Social Darwinist
geopolitics of the late nineteenth century. Through these two episte-
mological frameworks, the consolidation of geographically contiguous
territories and the integration of societies within those territories be-
came the sine qua non of national power and survival. The founders
of national security states were animated by two overriding motiva-
tions. First, they directly correlated national power with the domina-
tion of resources, territory, people, and violence; second, they directly
correlated national power with a state-directed project of industrializa-
tion, nationalism, and social welfare. The NSS was premised further
on a world of external threats—almost always state-centered in ori-
gin—directed against national autonomy and territory, from which the
nation must be defended. The interests of state and citizen (and cor-
porate actors, as well) were thereby seen to coincide, even in the
economic and cultural spheres (Lipschutz, 1989: ch. 5).
This process of national consolidation was neither quick nor
simple. National states emerged only very slowly out of the monar-
chies and empires of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and
they were constantly opposed and suppressed, as evidenced in the
Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the counterrevolutions of 1848 and
1872. But the idea of the nation-state—an autonomous entity that
contained within itself all those who met specified (and largely con-
structed) ascriptive requirements and excluded or assimilated those
who did not (Brown, 1992)—proved more powerful in the longer run.
To protect against revanchism and reaction, however, it was also nec-
essary for states to develop military capabilities.
By the end of the nineteenth century, moreover, it was clearly in
the strategic interest of some nation-states that other territorial entities
become nation-states, too. This would reduce the dominance of the
European empires as well as the economic potential inherent, if not
realized, in control of extensive territories. It would also transfer power
to the more capital-intensive and concentrated nation-state (capital
intensive in terms of both “human capital” and finance). It can be said
fairly that the NSS reached its apogee during World War II, with total
social and industrial mobilization by both Allied and Axis coalitions;
even during the first decades of the Cold War, the two superpowers
failed to achieve this level in either scale or scope (Friedberg, 1991;

Davis, 1991). World War II nevertheless fatally weakened those em-
pires that had survived World War I and, under an American logic of
“divide and conquer,” the remaining empires slowly decomposed into
smaller, militarily and economically weaker nation-states during the
twenty years following 1945.
The coincidence of interests between the NSS and its citizens has
not always been either obvious or stable. This can be seen, for ex-
ample, in the relationship between Nazi Germany and its Jewish resi-
dents. In that instance, Jews were claimed to be a threat to the “German
people,” and anti-Semitism helped to recreate shared interests among
non-Jewish Germans that had been dissolved by the spread of capital-
ism and the crises of the Weimar Republic. Historically, such antago-
nisms have developed, or have been cultivated, for political and strategic
reasons. This is not what is happening today.
With the trend toward individualism and the growing reliance on
markets, what is good for General Motors is not always good for the
United States (or vice versa). Today, the policies that generate national
military power may very well create individual insecurity, and the
actions of individuals in the market may very well weaken the state.
While this trend began as long ago as the 1970s, the extent of the
divergence between state and citizen only became really evident dur-
ing the 1990s, as the supposed global threat posed by Communism
receded and was replaced by more localized and inchoate ones.
Why has this happened? To understand the causes of the decom-
position of the NSS, we need to look more closely at the intersection
of security strategy and economic policy during the Cold War (Pollard,
1985; McCormick, 1996). For the NSS, this connection was manifest
in neomercantilism, and during and after World War II, the
neomercantilist geopolitical discourses of Mackinder (1919/1962, 1943),
Spykman (1942, 1944) and others were transmuted into the contain-
ment policy attributed to George Kennan (Gaddis, 1982) and formal-
ized in documents such as NSC-68 (Dalby, 1990; Agnew & Corbridge,
1995). There was, however, a contradiction inherent in containment.
The neomercantilistic geopolitical framework of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries was unsuited for the postwar period,
especially as envisioned by the founders of the Bretton Woods system.
Such a geopolitics treated the nation-state—or empire—as the natural
42 Chapter 3
unit of analysis and policy. The liberalization project of American

postwar planners posited a non-imperial, open economic realm much
larger than the national territorial space. As Fred Block (1977) has
pointed out, such a system could not exist if limited to national capi-
talist markets.
Consequently, a new unit of analysis and action emerged: the
Free World. Inside the borders of the Free World, all states would be
united in pursuit of common goals based on individualism and the
human propensity to “truck and barter.” Outside would be those states
whose mode of behavior was “unnatural,” spoken of in terms of “rot-
ten apples” threatening the Free World’s future (a point further devel-
oped in chapter 7). The survival and success of the Free World thus
depended on creating and extending boundaries around a “natural
community” (Stone, 1988) that had not, heretofore, existed. The sur-
vival and prosperity of the Free World on one side of the boundaries
of containment came to rest upon keeping out the influences of the
Soviet bloc on the other side of those boundaries. Indeed, the Free
World could not have existed without the “Unfree World.”
Within the Free World, however, the maintenance of community
was more problematic, for it relied on broad acceptance of a hierarchy
that often rankled lower-ranked members. Economic liberalism would
make the Free World stronger, but it required a globalized version of
neomercantilism in which those inside were restricted in dealing with
those outside. Inasmuch as there was only so much that could be done
to prevent such exchange from taking place, making the Free World
work also required a shift of sovereignty from the state to the indi-
vidual, the “natural” unit of interaction in the market. This, in turn
would prevent Free World states from asserting too strongly their
national autonomy as against the economic rights of their citizens.
To fully carry through this shift meant that the state would have
to yield up its sovereign prerogatives to the market and loosen its
control over the domestic economy, a move with security implications
(Moravcsik, 1991). Free trade and comparative advantage apply not
only to wool and wine, but also to guns and gyroscopes, goods with
military potential. For this reason, COCOM, the Coordinating Com-
mittee, was established to prevent such goods from falling into Com-
munist hands. Rather than regulating what could be produced
domestically, the state was now allowed only to limit what could be
exported (Pollard, 1985; Crawford, 1993; Mastanduno, 1991). The

borders of Free World nations would be breached by flows of raw
materials, manufactures, technology, capital, and even labor—in theory
if not practice—in the name of growing and spreading markets (but
see Ruggie, 1983a). And the idea that the state was the “natural” unit
of self-defense would gradually wither. The United States, as the core
of this global system, was expected to remain technologically domi-
nant, thereby retaining its edge and autonomy (although this is not
what has actually come to pass, much to the dismay of numerous
analysts and policymakers; see Sandholtz, et. al., 1992). In theory, all
barriers to economic intercourse would have to fall to fully realize the
potential of liberalization; in practice, there was (and continues to be)
strong resistance to this on the part of some countries, although to
little avail.
The Soviet Union’s approach to economic control was not en-
tirely dissimilar. Stalin sought to establish an economic sphere domi-
nated by the USSR, while hewing more closely to the mercantilistic
prescriptions of Friedrich List (1856; see also Davis, 1991; Crawford
1993). Within what came to be called the “Soviet bloc,” a division of
labor emerged too, but one directed by central planning rather than the
“invisible hand” (Bunce, 1985). This unit was never as economically
integrated as the Free World and, more to the point, actively sought to
restrict the kind of exchange that, in its opposite number, fostered
rapid technological innovation (Crawford, 1995). Ultimately, that strat-
egy failed. But note: in a world of states and blocs organized around
“national capitalism” rather than Free World liberalism, the Soviet
bloc might well have measured up to anything the West could have
offered.9 There is no way to verify such a counter-factual but, through-
out the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet bloc growth rates and technological
achievements were impressive and were seen to be quite threatening
(Davis, 1991).
Such area-based economic arrangements also played important
domestic roles in the security strategies of both the United States and
the Soviet Union. The NSS sought to maintain discipline within its
borders in order to keep enemies out and citizens loyal. I use the term
“discipline” here not to denote militarization or regimentation but,
rather, to describe a social regimen whereby those who questioned or
challenged the premises of the NSS were either chastised or ostracized
44 Chapter 3
(see chapter 7). While such discipline was, quite clearly, much harsher
on the Soviet side of the East-West divide, it was not wholly unknown
in the West. By opting for autarky and authoritarianism, and an economy
whose main customer was the state rather than the consumer, the
Soviet approach made the task of social control that much easier (al-
though more visible and generative of resistance).
The United States, pursuing liberal economic and political orga-
nization, focused on individual well-being at home and state power
abroad. This made social discipline more difficult, because it was
premised on a particular type of mental and material conformity that
penalized aberrant thoughts and practices through social ridicule and
rejection, rather than on an outright totalitarianism that rewarded dis-
sidence with prison or exile. People whose behavior went beyond
accepted limits were tagged as Communists or social deviants, and
offered the opportunity to rejoin the community only if they would
recant their heretical beliefs. Many did. Those who didn’t were labeled
“un-American” and blacklisted. This system of social discipline began
to break down in the 1960s, but it has only been seriously undermined
during the past two decades as hyperliberal tendencies have begun to
bite deeply into American society (Hirsch, 1995; Barber, 1995).
The result of hyperliberalism has been a squeeze on labor and the
privileging of capital.10 Gradually, the squeeze has been extended from
the blue-collar to the white-collar workforce, as well as the military and
defense sectors, with successive “downsizings” and mergers among
corporations, as they struggle to reduce costs, improve balance sheets
and maintain share value (Nasar, 1994; Edmunds, 1996; Uchitelle, 1998).
By now, whether or not it is statistically correct, there is a widespread
perception within major segments of the American labor force that no
forms of employment are secure (Uchitelle, 1994; Marshall, 1995a; New
York Times, 1996). Policymakers and academics such as Robert Reich
(1992: part II) argue that “symbolic analysts,” the production workers of
the information age, are secure for the future; the reality is that new
information technologies may make many of them redundant, too.11
Even as the U.S. economy continues to grow, so do the conditions for
alienation, atomization, and social disintegration.
The impacts of this change are visible in efforts to rediscipline
society. Thus, policymakers struggle to find new threats and define
new visions, strategies, and policies for making the world “more se-
cure.” People, losing faith in their leaders and the state, take things
into their own hands. Gated communities proliferate in order to keep
out the chaos. The privitization of security continues apace and be-
comes another realm of commodification. Conservative disciplining of
liberals and gays mounts. And the most popular television and film
“true-life” stories and newscasts inform us just how insecure each of
us should really feel. In a perverse inversion of Herz and Jervis, the
national security state is brought down to the level of the household,
and each one arms itself against the security dilemma posed by its
neighbor across the hedge or fence.
Confronting the Insecurity Dilemma
The difficulties associated with “redefining security policy” (Krause

and Williams, 1996, 1997) to meet these changing circumstances sug-
gests the appearance of a fundamental ontological hole within national
identities, especially that of the United States. In the absence of threats
or enemies that affect equally all citizens of a country, there can be no
overarching ontology of security, no shared identity differentiating the
national self from threatening others, no consensus on what—if any-
thing—should be done.12 No single real or constructed problem—short
of the alien invasions and cometary impacts depicted in recent films—
offers the comprehensive threat of total destruction once promised by
East-West nuclear war. What are national security planners to do when,
in succeeding beyond their wildest visions in making the country safe,
they have also set the stage for domestic anarchy? The simple answer:
find new sources of threat and insecurity, both internal and external.
Security has been defined conventionally in terms of the state as
a nonarticulated or non-internally-differentiated unit. The “black box”
state of realism has always been understood to be a heuristic
simplification. Nonetheless, that model does suggest that external threats
affect all members of the polity living inside the box to a more-or-less
equal degree. In the case of war, everyone’s future would be chal-
lenged; in the case of nuclear war, anyone (if not everyone) might die.
Even Communist subversion could strike at any place, at any time.
Whether this was ever “true” or not, it is no longer the case. This loss
of total coverage is problematic: In place of comprehensive threats, the
46 Chapter 3
“new” ones discussed or imagined by policymakers, academics and

strategists affect only selected groups and classes within states, with
differential impacts that depend, to a significant degree, on an
individual’s economic, cultural, and social backgrounds.
The social consequences of poverty are not deemed to be a broad-
band threat; the social consequences of Internet pornography are. The
impacts of generally poor health are of concern, but are not a national
priority; the impacts of biological weapons in one or two cities are. A
U.S. congressman can argue that “We can no longer define our na-
tional security in military terms alone. Our ignorance of world cultures
and world languages represents a threat to our ability to remain a
world leader” (San Francisco Chronicle, 1991a). A newspaper edito-
rial can warn that “the major threats to security today are probably
found in such disparate sources as the world’s overcrowded class-
rooms, understaffed health facilities, shrinking oil fields, diverted riv-
ers, and holes in the ozone layer” (San Francisco Chronicle, 1991b).
A conservative commentator can suggest that threats arise from “the
explicit assault on Western culture by ‘politically correct’ radicals,”
manifested in ‘multiculturalism’” (Lind, 1991:40). And President
Clinton (1997) can propose that “[T]he dangers we face are unprec-
edented in their complexity.”
The segmentation of threats is especially manifest in different
areas of American public and private life. For instance, in June 1996,
then-CIA director John Deutch (U.S. Senate, 1996) told the Senate
Governmental Affairs Committee of
[e]vidence that a number of countries around the world are devel-

oping the doctrine, strategies and tools to conduct information
attacks. . . . International terrorist groups clearly have the capabil-
ity to attack the information infrastructure of the United States,
even if they use relatively simple means. . . . [A] large-scale at-
tack on U.S. computer networks could cripple the nation’s energy,
transportation, communications, banking, business and military
systems, which are all dependent on computers that could be
vulnerable to sabotage ranging from break-ins by unauthorized
“hackers” to attacks with explosives.
Asked whether the threat of such attacks was comparable to those

associated with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, Deutch
replied, “I would say it was very, very close to the top.” Another
witness warned that failure to prepare for such attacks could result in
“an electronic Pearl Harbor” (U.S. Senate, 1996). None of the wit-
nesses noted that most computer network breakdowns have, so far,
been directly attributable to snafus in hardware and software.13
Of particular interest here are the content and implications of the
language used to frame the dangers of information warfare. Deutch
and his colleagues compare an incident with a fairly selective class
impact, which would affect those tied into long-distance cyberspace
systems, with two of the best-known images of war from the past fifty
years, suggesting a quite improbable degree of disruption and destruc-
tion. While neither Pearl Harbor nor Hiroshima led to national de-
struction, the image of a “bolt from the blue,” drawn from nuclear war
discourses, certainly suggests such a possibility.
Deutch’s testimony raises a further set of questions: If so-called
international terrorists can use simple means to attack the information
infrastructure, why have they not done so? Where are the nuclear
suitcase bombs? Who has spread radiation and bacteria over American
cities? When has anyone put drugs and poisons in urban water sup-
plies? And, against whom would the United State retaliate should such
incidents occur? There is a not-so-subtle implication in Deutch’s state-
ment that the United States—perhaps through the National Security
Agency—is itself capable of conducting information attacks, and has
practiced them. This, in turn, suggests self-induced fears generated by
projecting U.S. national capabilities onto imagined others (see below).
Ironically, Deutch’s warnings of “hackers” remind us that villians might
also be the boy or girl upstairs or next door or down the road!
Such rhetorical tactics are hardly new or innovative; Deutch’s
objective is to mobilize legislators into action “by scaring the hell out
of them,” as Senator Arthur Vandenburg counseled President Truman
to do in 1947. As well, the broadening of national security language
to encompass a wide range of social issues and problems has a long
history. In the 1950s, education, health, and highways were brought
under the “National Defense” blanket. During the 1980s, all manner of
commercial research and development were deemed essential to na-
tional security. But what is missing from pronouncements such as
Deutch’s is a conviction that all Americans are exposed equally to
information warfare. The truth is that, although the American economy
48 Chapter 3
is heavily dependent on electronic software, hardware, and networks,

warnings about information warfare are a lot like those about prospec-
tive climate change. Both might happen, but there is also a lot of
handwaving going on. Still, why do we seem so eager to engage
deeply with the former and not the latter? Is it because we already
have the hammer?
The contemporary search for threats to which we can match our
capabilities has a rather frantic quality about it, as though even those
who warn about them are not wholly convinced that they are imminent
or “real.” This suggests, in turn, that the process whereby contemporary
national security policy is made is not so simple as discovering and
specifying foreign “threats” to which we can then rationally respond.
New Threats or No Threats?
It is in this context that the insecurity dilemma emerges full-blown to

challenge the ontology of the national security state: If there are no
plausible threats, what is the purpose of the NSS? If imagined threats
are selective and domestic, why continue to expand military capabili-
ties? And if individuals are more concerned about themselves than
their society, how can support for security policy be mobilized? It is
in this context, too, that the struggle to redefine security has been and
is taking place. To understand both the insecurity dilemma and the
struggle over “redefining security,” we must consider how security is
constituted as both concept and practice. Conceptualizations of secu-
rity—from which follow policy and practice—are to be found in dis-
courses of security. Such discourses of security are neither strictly
objective assessments nor purely analytical constructs of threat. They
are, rather, the products of historical structures and processes, of
struggles for power within the state, of conflicts between the societal
groupings that inhabit states and the interests that beseige them.
Hence, not only are there struggles over security among nations,
there are also struggles over security among notions. Winning the right
to define security provides not just access to resources but also the
authority to articulate new definitions and discourses of security, thereby
directing the policy that leads to real, material outcomes. As Karen
Litfin (1994:13) points out,
As determinants of what can and cannot be thought, discourses

delimit the range of policy options, thereby functioning as precur-
sors to policy outcomes. . . . The supreme power is the power to
delineate the boundaries of thought—an attribute not so much of
specific agents as it is of discursive practices.
Discourses of security, however clearly articulated, thus remain fraught

with contradictions that are ignored or minimized but that nonetheless
provide important insights into them.14
How and where do discourses of threat and security originate?
Barry Buzan (1991:37) has pointed out that “There is a cruel irony
in [one] meaning of secure which is ‘unable to escape’.” To secure
oneself is, therefore, a sort of trap, for one can never leave a secure
place without incurring risks. Moreover, security appears to be mean-
ingless either as concept or practice without an “Other” to help specify
the conditions of insecurity that must be guarded against. James Der
Derian (1995), citing Nietzsche, points out that this “Other” is made
manifest through differences that create terror and collective resent-
ment of difference—leading to a state of fear—rather than a coming
to terms with the positive potentials of difference. As these differ-
ences become less than convincing, or fail to be made manifest,
however, their power to create fear and terror diminish, and so it
becomes necessary to discover ever more menacing threats to rees-
tablish difference.
For this purpose, reality may no longer suffice.15 What is substi-
tuted, instead, is a dangerous world of imagined threats. Not imagi-
nary threats, but threats conjured up as things that could happen.
Paradoxically, then, it becomes the imagined, unnamed party, with the
clandestinely assembled and crude atomic device, and not the thou-
sands of reliable, high-yield warheads mounted on missiles poised to
launch at a moment’s notice, that is used to create fear, terror, and calls
for action. It is the speculation about mysterious actors behind blown-
up buildings and fallen jetliners, and not rather banal defects in wiring
and fuel tanks, that creates the atmosphere for greater surveillance and
control. It is suspicion of neighbors, thought to be engaged in subver-
sive or surreptitious behaviors, listening to lewd lyrics or logged-on to
lascivious Web pages, and not concerns about inner-city health and
welfare, that brings calls for state intervention.
50 Chapter 3
None of this means that threats do not exist, or that these particular
matters could not do substantial damage to U.S. society, if realized as
imagined. Rather, it is to point out that imagination sets no limits to the
threats we might conjure up. As David Campbell (1992:2) argues,
[I]nfectious diseases, accidents, and political violence (among other

factors) have consequences that can literally be understood in
terms of life and death. But not all risks are equal, and not all
risks are interpreted as dangers. Modern society contains within
it a veritable cornucopia of danger; indeed, there is such an abun-
dance of risk that it is impossible to objectively know all that
threatens us. Those events or factors that we identify as danger-
ous therefore come to be ascribed as such only through an inter-
pretation of their various dimensions of dangerousness.
Finally, although they might only be imagined, even threats that never
come to pass can still have real, material consequences if they are
treated as though they were real and imminent. And such treatments
can be only too deadly. The weapons sent to the Siad Barre regime in
Somalia during the late 1970s and 1980s were intended to counter an
imagined Soviet “resource war” in the Horn of Africa (Lipschutz,
1989), but they proved quite enough to kill Americans and Somalis
alike during the 1990s.
Two consequences follow from the production of a world of
imagined threats. The first is that particular social issues may be recast
in militarized terms. Thus, although the consumption of drugs within
American society has domestic social and economic roots, the “war on
drugs” is conducted largely within a military mind-set that turns par-
ents and teachers into soldiers, children into threatened civilians, and
inner-city residents into enemies (Campbell, 1992: chap. 7; see also
Massing, 1998).
The second consequence is that the long arm of the state’s secu-
rity apparatus is extended into those realms of everyday life that oth-
erwise might be considered to be insulated from it (Gill, 1995). Consider
U.S. laws that permit the government to examine the personal and
professional lives of air travelers as a means of finding individuals
whose personality profiles match those of putative “terrorists” (Broeder,
1996), or the militarization of urban police departments as part of a
“war on crime” (Gaura and Wallace, 1997). All individuals, whether
citizen or permanent resident, whether legal or illegal, become poten-

tial threats to state security, even though the absolute numbers of ter-
rorists, criminals and chronic drug users is quite small (I return to this
point in chapter 7; see also Lipschutz, 1999b).
That security might be, therefore, socially constructed does not
mean that there are not to be found real, material conditions that help
to create particular interpretations of threats, or that such conditions
are irrelevant to either the creation or undermining of the assumptions
underlying security policy. But enemies often imagine their Others
into being, via the projections of their worst fears onto the Other (as
the United States did with Japan in the late 1980s and with China in
the 1990s). In this respect, their relationship is intersubjective. To the
extent that each acts on these projections, threats to each other acquire
a material character. In other words, nuclear-tipped ICBMs are not
mere figments of our imagination, but their targeting is a function of
what we imagine their possessors might do to us (I return to this point
in chapter 4).
Present at the Creation?
As I noted earlier, the ways in which social matters come under

the security umbrella is only too familiar to those in the United States
who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when interstate highways,
mathematics, and social science all were subsumed under “national
defense.” Today, however, a different logic is at work. Social welfare
issues and matters of culture are cast as threats to the body politic, not
as things to be brought within the security sphere. How such threats
and dangers can affect national security is not made clear. What such
examples do suggest, however, is that threats are not necessarily the
product of verifiable, objective material conditions outside of a state’s
borders (or inside, for that matter). Rather, conceptions of threats arise,
as argued above, out of discursive practices within states and, only
secondarily, among states (Banerjee, 1991; Kull, 1985, 1988).
As data flow in and information accumulates, someone must make
sense of it. There is an excess of data that must be interpreted. Infor-
mation that is not easily understood because of its uniqueness or com-
plexity is likely to be interpreted in terms of existing frames of reference
52 Chapter 3
(as George Kennan did in the Long Telegram of 1946). The most
available frames are those already widely accepted. QED. If this is so,
then we must also ask: “Who defines security?” Who proposes how
the elements of national power should be mobilized, and to what end?
Who has the legitimacy and power to make such proposals? Who is
engaged in the social construction of threats and security policy? And
how are those ideas disseminated and, finally, realized?16
The fundamental assumption underlying many discussions of
“security” is that the creation and propogation of security discourses
falls within the purview of certain authorized individuals and groups
within a state’s institutions. They possess not only the legitimate right
to define what constitutes a threat to security, but also to specify which
definitions of threat and security will be legitimate. Generally speak-
ing, such individuals and groups are assumed to be aware of:
1. A consensual definition of what constitutes security—there is,

in other words, an empirical reality to which the definition
applies and on which all can agree;
2. Objective conditions of threat that stand regardless of any
individual’s subjective position;
3. Special knowledge of conditions that allows for the formula-
tion and conduct of policies required by this single definition
of security—that is, an understanding of causal relations that
will point to determinate outcomes.17
Possession of what is presented as an unambiguous understand-

ing of cause and effect enables these individuals and groups to define
threats to security and, in response to specific conditions, formulate
policy that will, in their judgement, best secure the state. To be sure,
policymakers define security on the basis of a set of assumptions re-
garding vital interests, plausible enemies, and possible scenarios, all of
which grow, to a not-insignificant extent, out of the specific historical
and social context of a particular country and some understanding of
what is “out there.”18 But while these interests, enemies, and scenarios
have a material existence and, presumably, a real import for state
security, they cannot be regarded simply as having some sort of “ob-
jective” reality independent of these constructions.19
Borrowing from the work of Ole Wæver (1995), I want to sug-

gest that what actually happens in the formulation and implementation
of security policy is quite different from the standard model. Wæver
argues that elites securitize issues by engaging in “speech acts” that
frame and freeze discourses. The very act of designating an issue or
matter as having to do with security helps to establish and reproduce
the conditions that bring that issue or matter into the security realm.20
As Wæver (1995:55) puts it,
By uttering “security,” a state-representative moves a particular

development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special
right to use whatever means are necessary to block it.
In intervening in this way, the tools applied by the state look very
much like those used during the wars the state might launch if it chose
to do so.21 Definitions and practices of security consequently emerge
and change as a result of discourses and discursive actions intended to
reproduce historical structures and subjects within states and among
them (Banerjee, 1991).
Who are these security elites? That is, who “constructs” threats
and makes security policy? As far as the process of making security
is concerned, there are three potentially different answers. First, we
can point to those individuals (or groups, interests, or classes; it doesn’t
really matter which) responsible for overseeing the power of the state
(e.g., the military, defense analysts in and out of government, etc.).
Second, there are those responsible for overseeing the institutions of
the state (policymakers, legislative representatives, bureaucrats). Fi-
nally, there are those responsible for overseeing the idea of the state
(heads of state, leaders, national heroes or symbols, teachers, religious
figures, etc.; see Buzan, 1991). Each of these groups may conceive of
security somewhat differently, and they may intrude on each other’s
turf, but under “normal” conditions, there is little or no basic disagree-
ment among them about the amount of security required.
In a cohesive, conceptually robust state, a broadly accepted
definition of both national identity and the security speech acts needed
to freeze that identity is developed and reinforced by each of these
three groups as a form of Gramscian hegemony. Each group, in turn,
contributes to the discourses that maintain that conventional wisdom.
54 Chapter 3
The authority and power of these groups, acting for and within the
state, is marshaled against putative threats, both internal and external.
The institutions of the state oversee policies directed against these
threats, and the specific “idea” of the state—and identity of its citi-
zens—comes to be reinforced in terms of, first, how the state stands
and acts in relation to those threats and, second, the way those respon-
sible for maintenance of the idea (through socialization) communicate
this relationship. The outcome is a generally accepted authorized (by
authorities) consensus on what is to be protected, the means through
which this is to be accomplished, and the consequences if such actions
are not taken.
Such a consensus is by no means immutable. Things change. A
catastrophe can undermine a consensual national epistemology, as in
the case of Germany and Japan after World War II. But it is also
possible that what might appear to others to be a disaster, for example,
Iraq’s defeat in 1991, can also provide an opportunity for reinforce-
ment of that epistemology, as has been apparent in Iraq since 1991.
The systemic changes discussed earlier can also undermine consensus,
although much more slowly. Domestic and external forces can act so
as to chip away or splinter hegemonic discourses by undermining the
ideational and material bases essential to their maintenance and the
authority of those who profess them. If there is some question about
the legitimacy of the state and its institutions, or the validity of its
authority, those in positions of discursive power may decide to
rearticulate the relationship between citizen identity and state idea.
Russian president Yeltsin’s (unsuccessful) search for a new “national
idea” is an example of this. Another involves the restoration or refur-
bishment of old epistemologies (as in “despite the end of the Cold
War, the world remains a dangerous place; therefore rely on our judge-
ment which so often before has proved valid”).
To put my point another way, a consensual conception of secu-
rity is stable only so long as people have a vested interest in the
maintenance of that particular conception of security. If social change
undermines the basis for this conception—for example, by diminish-
ing the individual welfare of many people, by making the conception
seem so remote as to be irrelevant, by forgetting the civic behaviors
that once reminded everyone about that conception—consensus can
and will break down. This may happen, as well, if a particular concept
or construction is increasingly at odds with material evidence, or if

state institutions are unable to “deliver the goods.” Particular discourses
can also shift back and forth, as enemies become friends (Russia) and
friends threaten to become enemies again (China). But contradictions
between older definitions and changing material conditions can also
lead to contestation between competing discourses of security (as in
“computer hackers’ ability to engage in information warfare is para-
mount,” so we need new tools and organizations to catch them).22
The failure of any particular discourse to establish its hegemony
means that there can result discursive confusion and contestation over
the meaning(s) of security among those who, for one reason or an-
other, have a vested interest in a consensual construction. This interest,
or the expected benefits, may well be material and not just a matter of
patriotic loyalty to nation; by defining security in a particular way, one
serves to legitimate a particular set of policy responses. Associated
with these are very real armaments, force structures, diplomatic strat-
egies, domestic economic policies, jobs, titles, and incomes (Smithson,
1996). Wall Street has a particular stake in maintaining good relations
with China; cultural conservatives and defense corporations have a
stake in imagining a Chinese threat against which we must “be pre-
pared.” The risk in the former is that such relations have an impact on
domestic industry and employment, and could delegitimate that policy;
the risk in the latter is that the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
might take the conservatives seriously (especially if they can affect
security policy) and respond in commensurate fashion.
A discursive remodeling of security may also reinforce the
identification of citizens with their state, or it can further divide them.
If threats to security can be framed in a particular fashion as, for
example, arising from a particular enemy, the differentiation between
“us” and “them” becomes clearer; states tend to be defined, at least in
part, in terms of “negative organizing principles” (Buzan, 1991:79; see
also Huntington, 1996, 1997). The security framework is also but-
tressed intellectually through reinforcement or establishment of indi-
vidual roles in a variety of structures and institutions—government,
industry, academia. These are linked to a negative organizing principle
and its substantiation, in the form of national security advisors and
analysts, pundits and professors. Individuals, as well as states, can thus
come to define themselves in relation to national security. But, as we
56 Chapter 3
are reminded by conspiracy theories about the New World Order, black
helicopters, and UN forces in Canada, some discursive frames can
decompose the formerly linked security of state and people (Lipschutz,
1998b).
To return to an earlier question: Who constructs and articulates
contesting discourses of national security? Among such people are
mainstream “defense intellectuals” and strategic analysts, those indi-
viduals who, sharing a certain political culture, can agree on a com-
mon framework for defining security threats and policy responses (what
might be called a security “episteme”). While their discourse is con-
structed around the interpretation of “real” incoming data, their analy-
sis is framed in such a way as to, first, define the threat as they see it
and, second, legitimate those responses that validate their construction
of the threat (see, e.g., Schlesinger, 1991). To repeat: this does not
mean that threats are imaginary. Rather, they are imagined and con-
structed in such a way as to reinforce existing predispositions and
thereby legitimate them. This legitimation, in turn, helps to reproduce
existing policy or some variant of it as well as the material basis for
that policy.
Finally, we might ask why “redefine security?” Who advocates
such an idea? During the 1980s, at the time this argument was first
made (Ullman, 1983; Mathews, 1989), the individuals comprising this
group were an amorphous lot, lacking an integrated institutional base
or intellectual framework (a situation that has slowly changed during
the 1990s). Most tended to see consensual definitions and dominant
discourses of security as failing to properly perceive or understand the
objective threat environment, but they did not question the logic whereby
threats and security were defined. In other words, the redefiners pro-
posed that the “real” threats to security were different from those that
policymakers and defense authorities were generally concerned about,
but that the threats were “really out there.”
The redefiners argued further that the failure to recognize real
threats could have two serious consequences: First, it might underminine
state legitimacy, inasmuch as a national defense that did not serve to
protect or enhance the general welfare (which is what “security” often
comes to mean) would lose public support. Second, it would repro-
duce a response system whose costs would increasingly outweigh
benefits. At the same time, however, the redefiners did not propose a
shift away from state-based conceptions of security; rather, their argu-

ments sought to buttress eroding state authority by delineating new
realms for state action. Thus, for example, discussions of “environ-
mental security” focused on the need for governments to establish
themselves as meaningful actors in environmental protection as it related
to state maintenance. This would mean establishing a sovereignty claim
in a realm heretofore unoccupied, and defining that realm as critical in
security terms.23
Interestingly (and, perhaps, predictably), since the concept of
environmental security was first offered, it has gradually acquired
acceptance among Western military and political institutions, not be-
cause the threats are necessarily evident or can be addressed through
military means but because it provides them with a new mission, both
conceptual and material. Many of the arguments for redefining secu-
rity can be seen in retrospect, therefore, as part of an effort to shore
up crumbling rationales for state sovereignty, a goal not so far from
that desired by security authorities themselves.
The success of the redefiners has been considerable, especially in
terms of the “new threats” being integrated into the existing machinery
of national security (see chapter 4). A few analysts have argued that
the purity of the security field must be maintained if it is to have any
disciplinary rigor or meaning (Walt, 1991; Deudney, 1990). Others
have written that traditional security concerns will soon reemerge, in
one form or another, and that it is premature to turn our attention to
new problems (Kugler, 1995). Certainly, the lexicon of “new threats”
has been picked up and disseminated relentlessly, as seen in the 1997
Quadrennial Defense Review issued by the Pentagon (and addressed in
chapter 4). It is less clear whether the U.S. military has a clearly
conceived strategy for responding to these problems or whether they
have simply offered new rationales for old policies.
Perhaps security is an outmoded practice—as slavery, colonial-
ism, and the use of land mines have all come to be—both normatively
and materially bankrupt. Or perhaps the more traditional functions of
the state are being undermined by processes of interactive (and
intersubjective) change: States and governments can no longer manage
what they once did, and cannot yet manage what is new. Under these
circumstances, it begins to make less and less sense to see the state as
the referent object of security. Hence, we not only have to unwrap the
58 Chapter 3
ways in which changing material conditions affect the state materially,

we also have to understand how these changes alter the very idea of
the state—as well as the idea of security—thereby creating new ref-
erents of political activity and, perhaps, security.
(B)orders and (Dis)orders
To ask, then, the logical question: What is security? In a book pub-

lished in 1988, the authors could still argue that national borders re-
mained authoritative and determining of security:
In the most basic sense, what the American people have to deal
with when they adjust to the world outside U.S. frontiers is 170
[sic] assorted nation-states, each in control of a certain amount of
the earth’s territory. These 170 nations, being sovereign, are able
to reach decisions on the use of armed forces under their
government’s control. They can decide to attack other nations.
(Hartmann and Wendzel, 1988:3–4)
By 1989, it appeared that the roster of states had been fixed, the books
closed for good. Only Antarctica remained an unresolved puzzle, where
international agreements put overlapping national claims into indefinite
abeyance. There were many “international” borders, to be sure, but
these were understood to be fixed in number and location, inscribed in
stone and on paper. States might draw imaginary lines, or “bordoids,”
as Bruce Larkin (forthcoming) has stylized them, defining and encom-
passing “national interests” beyond their borders. They might extend
their borders in a somewhat hypothetical fashion in order to bring
allies into the sphere of blessedness, as in practice of extended deter-
rence in Europe. They might effectively take over the machinery of
other states, as in Central America and Central Asia, even as they paid
obeisance to the sacred lines on the ground, claiming to be protecting
the sovereignty of the fortunate victim. Enemies and threats were,
however, always across the line.
Is it the lines themselves that are the problem? If so, this suggests
that security discourse irreducibly invokes the authority of borders and
boundaries, rather than their physical or imagined presence, for its
power. Borders and boundaries presume categories of things, be they
people, states, or “civilizations,” and categories presume differences

between subjects on either side of the boundary. The practical difficulty
is always how authority is to be linked to these borders and boundaries
in order to maintain difference and constrain change. What authority
is capable of authorizing such lines?
James Der Derian (1995: 34) has pointed out that establishing
borders involves the drawing of lines between the collective self and
what is, in Nietzsche’s words, “alien and weaker.” In this way, the
boundary between known and unknown is reified and secured. But
such distinctions are not so easily made. Before 1989, Croat, Serb,
and Muslim had lived together in relative peace as “Yugoslavs” for
forty-five years. After 1991, the borders between them were, some-
how, authorized so as to magnify small differences and turn them
into an authorization for “ethnic cleansing.” These borders, more-
over, were drawn both on the ground and in the mind, so that the
“alien” could be identified, wherever his or her physical location
(chapter 6).
Thus, conventionally and historically, borders have been drawn
not only by dint of geography but also between the self and the enemy,
between the realm of safety and the realm of danger, between tame
zones and wild ones, between the supposedly known and the presum-
ably unverifiable and unknown. Traditionally, it was practitioners of
diplomacy and security who marked such borders between states, or
between groups of states, and they did so as the authorities who drew
the lines, maintained their integrity, and validated those characteristics,
whether cultural or political, that distinguished insider from outsider,
one side from the other.24
But such boundaries can be very fluid. Because they are as much
conceptual as physical, the insider must be disciplined (or self-disci-
plined) to remain within them. Hence, when the authority of borders
and boundaries weakens or disappears, the old (b)orders become dis-
ordered. In retrospect, the revolutions of 1989 actualized what had
already been underway for some time but was not recognized: the
fluidization, diminution, and dissolution of borders and intrastate bound-
aries. This was represented by a phenomenon that some observers had,
in the past, called “interdependence.” But interdependence assumes
the continuity of borders and boundaries, not their dissolution or the
intermingling of previously separated groups (see chapter 5).
60 Chapter 3
Paradoxically, as old borders disappeared, new ones emerged,

first in the mind and only then on the ground (Dawson, 1996). Former
comrades and compatriots now found themselves on the opposite sides
of borders, sometimes on the “wrong” side, as was the case with the
25 million Russians in the “near abroad.” New boundaries were drawn
through what had once been states or titular republics, creating mul-
tiple identities where before there had been (nominally) only one.
Even industrialized countries were not immune to this phenomenon, as
new lines were drawn between “true” nationals and the children of
immigrants who had never traveled to the old country. The post-1989
borders had much the same effect, with newly imagined nations mili-
tarizing their identities in order to establish their imagined autonomy
from old ones. In doing so, these new nations rejected the old ones,
rendering them both illegitimate and undesirable.
But new borders did not, and cannot, put an end to the old
questions: Who are you? Who am I? Why am I here? Boundaries are
always under challenge and they must always be reestablished, not
only on the ground but also in the mind. Here is where security is,
ultimately, to be found; here is where insecurity is, ultimately, gener-
ated. The marking of borders and boundaries is never truly finalized,
never finally set in stone. Borders are meant to discipline, but they also
offer the opportunity of being crossed or transgressed. Borders are
lines on maps and markers on the ground, but border regions are rarely
so neat. Borderlands are places where mixing occurs, or has occurred,
or might occur. They are, in themselves, a contradiction to, a rejection
of, the neatly drawn limits of the nation-state. Borderlands are thus a
threat to the security supposedly established by the authorized borders
precisely because they offer the possibility of people freely moving
back and forth across lines without ever actually crossing borders. It
is for this reason, as much as anything else, that border zones are
sometimes cleansed of people in the name of security.
How did this insecurity dilemma—the loss of firm boundaries—
come to pass? As is so often the case in human affairs, the causal
mechanism is overdetermined. Liberalization and globalization have
been major factors, but the “nuclear wars” that were “fought” between
1950 and 1989 also played a central role. Those wars were never
fought on the plains of Germany, as the planners of Flexible Response
and the AirLand Battle thought they would be, but they were fought
in the minds of the military, the policymakers, and a fearful public.

What became clear during the 1980s was that no amount of drawing
of lines or borders between friend and foe could limit the destruction
that would follow if missiles should be launched and opposing armies
thrown into battle. In the end, both sides would suffer immeasurable
consequences.25
Nuclear deterrence, in other words, came to depend not on physi-
cal destructiveness, but rather on the maintenance of borders on the
ground and in the mind: To be secure, one had to believe that, were
the Other to cross the line, both the self and the Other would cease to
exist; to maintain the line and be secure meant living with the risk that
it might be crossed. Although neither side would dare to physically
cross the line, it was still possible that mental crossings—what was
called “Finlandization” (a slur)—could occur. The threat of nothing-
ness secured the ontology of being, but at great political cost to those
who pursued the formula. Authority deemed the fiction necessary to
survival.
Since 1991, the nuclear threat has ceased to wield its old cogni-
tive force, and the borders in the mind and on the ground have van-
ished, in spite of repeated efforts to draw them anew, perhaps farther
East, perhaps elsewhere. To be sure, the United States and Russia still
do not launch missiles against each other because both know the result
would be annihilation. But the same is true for France and Britain, or
China and Israel. It was the existence of the Other across the border
that gave national security its power and authority; it is the disappear-
ance of the border that has vanquished that power. Where Russia is
now concerned, we are, paradoxically, not secure, because we see no
need to be secured.26 France is fully capable of doing great damage to
the United States, but that capability has no meaning in terms of U.S.
security. In other words, if safety cannot be distinguished from danger,
there is no border and, hence, no security problem.
The debates over the expansion of NATO, and the decision to
bring Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in from the cold, have
revived these very same questions. Who is inside? Who is outside? And
why does it matter? As a multilateral security alliance aimed at the
enemy to the East, NATO’s long-term mission had been to guard the
border, to keep the Elbe the line separating the Free World from its
unfree doppelgänger. Defining a new “mission” for NATO, or taking in
62 Chapter 3
new members, does not eliminate the conceptual insecurity arising

from the new boundaries or lack thereof. A new line is drawn, but
every one is careful not to authorize a new meaning for it. Yet, lines
are fraught with meanings and so, inevitably, a meaning is sought for
this one. Expansion is not directed against Russia, but it might be.
NATO will not use its military power to suppress ethnic groups within
Europe, but it has (and will, apparently). A Rapid Reaction Force
would not intervene in civil wars, but who knows for sure? What else
is NATO good for? Applying its military might against terrorists,
computer hackers, pornographers and pederasts, drug smugglers, and
illegal immigrants would be akin to killing a fly with a Peacekeeper
(whether missile or Colt .45).27
Conclusion
The insecurity dilemma is a permanent condition of life. This is

not, however, the same as the insecurity of a Hobbesian State of Nature,
or the fear that arises when neighbors, whether in the house or the
state next door, begin to arm. In today’s world, the insecurity dilemma
arises out of uncertainty, out of a changing and never fully predictable
world. Securing the self and the state against change works both ways:
it seeks to freeze lines on the ground and in the mind, and it keeps
baleful influences out, but also imprisons those protected within the
iron cage. I can do no better in ending this chapter than to quote James
Der Derian (1995:34), who argues that “A safe life requires safe truths.
The strange and the alien remain unexamined, the unknown becomes
identified as evil, and evil provokes hostility—recycling the desire for
security.” Surely we can do better than this.
4❖
ARMS AND AFFLUENCE
If you would have wealth, prepare for war.

—Unattributed
Whatever happened to World War III? For almost forty years, two
great military alliances faced off across a line drawn through the cen-
ter of a middling-sized peninsula, ready to destroy the world at a
moment’s notice in order to save it. John Lewis Gaddis (1987) called
this time the “Long Peace,” Mary Kaldor (1990), “the imaginary war.”1
When it was over, a few sentimentalists warned that we would soon
miss it, and tried to tell us why (Mearsheimer, 1990a, 1990b). For
many—especially the 20 or 30 million who died in Third World wars—
the violence was only too real. For other billions, there was a peace
of sorts, purchased only at great cost (Schwartz, 1998) and perpetual
terror. For the United States and its allies, it was a time of great
opportunity and prosperity. The 10 trillion or more dollars expended
on the Long Peace brought a period of unprecedented economic growth
and wealth. Affluence, it often seemed, was possible only with arms.
But even imagined wars must end (Iklé, 1971). Those that exist
in the fevered fantasies of war gamers and war-game writers can con-
tinue on computer monitors everywhere but, after a time, those played
63
64 Chapter 4
out by nuclear strategists within the Beltway, or by Special Forces in

far-off countries begin to lose their raison d’être as well as their au-
thority and ability to discipline when the “big one” does not come to
pass as threatened. If threats are to retain their power to terrorize,
therefore, they must be reimagined and fought, over and over, through
words, through symbols and images, through languages and rhetorics.
World War III was such a war. Although it never took place, it
was always about to break out. Peace became a fragile interregnum of
not-war. Preparations for the imaginary war were extensive and, in the
end, the war that never happened was extravagantly expensive. A poorer
world could not have afforded the peace of World War III, but it was
that peace that made the West so rich that it could afford to imagine
fighting World War III in Europe (and to actually fight it at a much
lower level in other parts of the world).
These days, there is no shortage of wars, despite the end of the
Cold War. But these are minor wars, relatively speaking. Big wars are
too expensive to wage in human terms, although they have also be-
come too costly not to imagine. No U.S. president, present or future,
could afford the political costs of even a fraction of the fifty thousand
American deaths suffered in Vietnam (apparently, the millions of Viet-
namese who died carried no such costs for American presidents). At
the same time, neither could a U.S. president, present or future, afford
the political costs of abandoning preparations for the “big one.”2 The
Gulf War cost more than $50 billion, but at a loss of less than two
hundred American lives (more died in accidents before and after the
fighting than in actual combat). The immediate costs of the war were
paid for largely through grants from allies; the strategy, underlying
technology, and resulting weaponry, however, were the products of the
imagined World War III. In the short term, the Gulf War gave no great
boost to the U.S. economy; in the longer term, the enduring “problem”
of Iraq has provided a justification for not abandoning imagined wars.
Pace Clausewitz, imagined war is the continuation of economics by
other means.
So, what does this mean for the future of war? The literature is
vast and growing. For some, the next enemy has been chosen, and the
coming war already imagined (Bernstein and Munro, 1997). But most
theorists and journalists of war are like the fabled drunk, looking for
opponents in the well-lit places, rather than in the shadows. For them,
Arms and Affluence 65
prevention of major wars through reliance on nukes, cruise missiles, and

the electronic battlefield remain paramount (Cohen, 1996). Yet, such
wars are the least likely. Moreover, most commentators seem to remain
fascinated by the kill rather than the whip, by missile defense rather than
mental offense. Few analysts of war bother to ask why a war might
begin or, for that matter, whether the kinds of wet-dream weapons that
excite soldier and civilian alike even have a role in the wars of the
future. After all, real war costs money—remember Bob Dole complain-
ing about wasting those expensive cruise missiles? Preparations for war
are good for business; deaths, however, are bad for politics.
Most contemporary discussions of strategy and battle are, there-
fore, not about “real” war. They are better understood as “discourses
of war” meant, in the absence of an omnipotent and omnicompetent
enemy, to terrorize and discipline both friend and foe, citizen and
immigrant, alike. A discourse, as noted in Chapter 3, is best under-
stood as an authoritative framework that purports to explain cause and
effect and, through practice and repetition, rules out and quashes al-
ternative explanations (Litfin, 1994). Discourses are rooted in the real
world, but their power comes from their narrative authority, and not
their assumed descriptive or analytical “objectivity” (for an excellent
discussion of discourses, see Hajer, 1993).
There are, to be sure, many discourses of war that could be
discussed here. With variations, however, the three that dominate
American thinking are: the last/next war, wars in small countries far
away, and imagined wars. In this chapter, I compare and contrast
discourses of wars with really existing war, and argue that the two bear
little relation to each other. I then discuss how several competing
discourses of war have been framed, and assess their political and
disciplinary character. Finally, I offer some speculative thoughts on the
future of war, especially in a global system in transition: Ten years
after, do we face perpetual peace or perpetual war?
Imagined Wars
In May 1997, the Clinton administration issued “A National Security

Strategy for a New Century” (Clinton, 1997). In it, the president waxed
enthusiastic about the future:
66 Chapter 4
As we enter the twenty-first century, we have an unprecedented

opportunity to make our nation safer and more prosperous. Our
military might is unparalleled; a dynamic global economy offers
increasing opportunities for American jobs and American invest-
ment; and the community of democratic nations is growing, en-
hancing the prospects for political stability, peaceful conflict
resolution and greater hope for the people of the world.
But, do not get too excited; Clinton also warned darkly that
ethnic conflict and outlaw states threaten regional stability; terror-

ism, drugs, organized crime and proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction are global concerns that transcend national borders;
and environmental damage and rapid population growth under-
mine economic prosperity and political stability in many coun-
tries. (Clinton, 1997)
Needless to say, these are difficult problems to address. Moreover,

they raise a host of additional questions: Whom do these phenomena
threaten, and how? Do they affect everyone to an equal degree? How
should we respond? Will our allies help? How much would it cost?
Who will pay? Is there reason to think we can solve such problems?
The detailed responses offered in this and other similar govern-
ment documents focus on the availability and utility of military power.
No surprises there: Deployment of military force remains the apotheo-
sis of state sovereignty, an arena in which the state exercises its great-
est discretion and control. Yet precisely how such capabilities are to be
used to control or eliminate these “new” threats remains problematic,
and this poses real epistemological difficulties for strategic planners.
According to the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR, 1997), issued by
the Pentagon in April 1997,
The security environment between now and 2015 will . . . likely

be marked by the absence of a “global peer competitor” able to
challenge the United states militarily around the world as the
Soviet Union did during the Cold War. Furthermore, it is likely
that no regional power or coalition will amass sufficient conven-
tional military strength in the next 10 to 15 years to defeat our
armed forces, once the full military potential of the United States
is mobilized and deployed to the region of conflict (QDR, 1997:
sec. 2, pp. 2–3).
Why, then, have a Pentagon? Searching for contingencies that demand

maintenance of the military, the authors of the QDR focus on “regional
dangers,” and conclude that
foremost among these [contingencies] is the threat of coercion and

large-scale, cross-border aggression against U.S. allies and friends
in key regions by hostile states with significant military power . . . [i]n
Southwest Asia . . . [i]n the Middle East . . . [and i]n East Asia [on]
the Korean peninsula . . . (QDR, 1997: section 2).
But if strength brings peace, it seems also to be debilitating. Despite

expressions of confidence regarding the future security environment,
U.S. military power and dominance are, rather paradoxically, also
portrayed as potential weaknesses. Enemies too cowardly to fight on
the field of battle will find other ways to strike back. Thus, the QDR
(1997: section 2, p. 2) warns that
U.S. dominance in the conventional military arena may encour-

age adversaries to use such asymmetric means [e.g., terrorism
and information warfare] to attack our forces and interests over-
seas and Americans at home. That is, they are likely to seek
advantage over the United States by using unconventional ap-
proaches to circumvent or undermine our strengths while exploit-
ing our vulnerabilities. (Emphasis added)
In this analysis, capabilities become impediments, and the ability to

act is transformed into a formula for paralysis. The apparent contradic-
tion is not explicable, however, in conventional strategic terms. It arises
because, on the one hand, nuclear deterrence has no effect at the
substate level. On the other hand, both the costs of reallocating de-
fense resources to respond appropriately and the costs of losing young
men and women in conventional ground combat, whether interstate or
intrastate, are too high in domestic political terms. Moreover, such
major changes might also be interpreted by some as “lack of resolve”
and a sign of “weakness.”
A nuclear World War III would have avoided such ontological
difficulties. Tens of millions might die on the home front, but their
deaths would make the loss of tens or hundreds of thousands on the
front seem minor by comparison. Today’s conventional warriors suffer
losses only on the battlefield, and each one is carefully counted by
68 Chapter 4
politicians (if not voters). Yet, as we were warned when NATO began
to bomb Yugoslavia, if we do not prepare for such wars, or shift our
attention to “not-wars,” aggressors (recalling Munich) will act aggres-
sively against us.
Virtual Nukes
Is there an answer to this dilemma? Apparently there is: the electronic

battlefield, whose ultimate application emerges through what is called
the “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA). The RMA envisions tech-
nicians safely ensconced in bunkers thousands of miles from the
fighting, using remote-control weapons to kill the enemy’s human
soldiers, destroy its material infrastructure, and encircle its territory
(Cohen, 1996). In practice, such technology is neither infallible nor
cheap; to paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen, when B-2 bombers cost
a billion dollars each, the loss of even one or two means that pretty
soon you are talking real money. Hence, the imagining of such wars
becomes the means of avoiding them (that the recipients of such vi-
sions might not emerge unscathed is, it would seem, of no concern to
policymakers and strategists). And, the communication of such imag-
ined futures to the global audience becomes central to the RMA and
its task of deterrence.
This is not really new, of course; deterrence—especially of the
nuclear variety—fulfills a similar communicative function. Nuclear
deterrence threatens to turn the world into a blackened cinder—to
bring a decidedly non-Hegelian end to history—if a putative enemy
chooses to transgress what the issuer of the threat considers the bound-
aries of acceptable behavior. The nuclear threat posits an imagined
future if certain actions are taken, but there is no intention to turn the
imaginary into the real; that would defeat the entire purpose of the
exercise. Our experience with such scenario building suggests, how-
ever, that the credibility of such an imagined threat remains problem-
atic, and this points to a structural flaw inherent in such deterrence.
Whereas conventional deterrence consists of threats to punish the
offender and can be tested, nuclear deterrence, according to most
conventional wisdom, cannot. Who, after all, would sacrifice New York
for Paris, or Los Angeles for an island in the South China Sea? The
use of a single nuclear weapon, as in the “firing of a warning shot

across the bow,” would prevent the enemy’s use of a second, according
to some (see, e.g., Scheer, 1982), but implicit in that first step is the
imagined escalation of a single nuclear explosion to thousands (Iklé,
1996). If such a calculus exists only in the imagination, however, it
can hardly be said to constitute a material threat or one whose veracity
can be demonstrated by example. Again, it is not action in response to
a provocation that halts an offender, but imagination that disciplines
prior to the initial offensive act.
In his famous “ladder of escalation,” Herman Kahn (1965) sought
to illlustrate through imagined scenario-building that there were many
nonnuclear way stations before Gehenna. Inasmuch as his was a theory
that could not be fully tested, much less tolerated, the scientific method
could not be vindicated for nuclear war. Consequently, World War III,
the Imaginary War, had to be conducted by other means, and enemies
had to be disciplined not by really existing wars but by wholly imag-
ined ones. The result was the war of things said and displayed, and the
curious way in which nuclear weapons were used. By not being used
in a literal sense, but only as a medium of exchange in an imagined
exchange, nukes disciplined Americans, Europeans, and Soviets alike.3
The notion of use thus began to acquire a peculiar function. The threat
to “use” nuclear weapons, as Thomas Schelling and others pointed
out, was credible only to the degree that those in a position of power
could convince not only others, but also themselves, that the weapons
would be used under appropriate circumstances (Schelling, 1966: chap.
2). But such circumstances could never be too well-defined, for to
specify actual conditions of attack might someday require an unwanted
launch for the sake of maintaining credibility. The “use” of nuclear
weapons consequently took the form of speech acts (Wæver, 1995),
backed up by doctrine and deployment, but hedged all about with
hypotheticals and conditionals.
The plausibility of an imagined action poses a further epistemo-
logical problem, however, not only for the threatened but also for the
threatener. To transform an imagined threat into one that might cred-
ibly be fulfilled, the issuer must behave in such a way that s/he actu-
ally believes that s/he would execute the imagined action. This will to
act must be conveyed fully to the recipient of the threat, or it may be
regarded as empty. Such intentionality requires a certain insouciance
70 Chapter 4
of speech that reduces the apocalyptic act to a mundane one (as docu-
mented by Robert Scheer (1982) in With Enough Shovels and Steven
Kull (1988) in Minds at War; the original effort in this direction is
Kahn, 1965). How else is one to explain pronouncements such as that
made by then-secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger (1982), who
argued in 1982 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Com-
mittee that
to deter successfully, we must be able—and must be seen to be

able—to retaliate against any potential aggressor in such a man-
ner that the costs we will exact will substantially exceed any
gains he might hope to achieve through aggression. We, for our
part, are under no illusions about the consequences of a nuclear
war: we believe there would be no winners in such a war. But this
recognition on our part is not sufficient to ensure effective deter-
rence or to prevent the outbreak of war: it is essential that the
Soviet leadership understands this as well. (First emphasis added)
In place of a thermonuclear holocaust, then, the nuclear estab-

lishment conducted a war of the imagination, of possible futures, of
horrors best avoided. Aided and abetted by science-fiction films and
novels, studies by the RAND Corporation and numberless institutes of
strategic studies, and offhand remarks by policymakers and military
officers, nuclear deterrence was raised to a perverse form of
art(iculation), in which a convoluted but safe rhetoric came to substi-
tute for risky and explicit action. Deterrence thus became a practice
akin to telling ghost stories around the campfire: if one could scare
oneself silly, perhaps others would be scared, as well (as Tom Leher
put it, “If Brezhnev is scared, I’m scared”). But one would never want
to become too scared, for to do so might be to lose self-control. . . .
A graphic example of nuclear discipline—one of many—took
place with the deployment of the intermediate-range nuclear
“Euromissiles,” the Pershing-II and Ground Launched Cruise Missiles
in Europe during the early 1980s. These missiles were intended to
fulfill an imagined lacuna in deterrence created by Soviet SS-20s in-
termediate-range nuclear missiles discovered in Eastern Europe during
the mid-1970s. The SS-20s, it was claimed by then-West German
chancellor Helmut Schmidt, imperiled the West by taking advantage of
a “gap” in the hypothetical ladder of crisis escalation that might be
climbed during a future confrontation over Berlin or some other point

on the East-West borderline. In such a crisis, the gap could be used by
the Soviets, according to Schmidt and others, to menace and discipline
Western Europe simply through the motions of preparing to launch the
SS-20s. Inasmuch as to actually let loose the SS-20s would have
unpredictable, not to mention undesirable, consequences, the result of
their presence in the East was to create a Western vision of an imag-
ined future in which such threats might be issued or even executed. In
the face of such an eventuality, the failure to respond appropriately
could lead to the “Finlandization” of Western Europe, which would be
forced to submit to demands made by the Soviet Union out of fear of
the imagined future.4
Such demands, of course, had not been made, and never were.
Indeed, it would have been considered exceptionally bad manners to
actually make such a demand. Rather, they were demands that some
in the West imagined might be forthcoming at some future date, and
they were demands that, if met, would change Western Europe into
something with a different identity and loyalty (a Greater Finland,
perhaps?). Imagined threats could not be left alone; they had to gen-
erate material responses. To remedy the hole in the whole of nuclear
deterrence, policymakers determined that NATO must deploy its own
equivalent missiles, thereby countering one imagined war-fighting
scenario with another.
Again, the Euromissiles were never intended to be launched;
they were only put into Europe to fill an imagined gap that had not
existed prior to the West’s awareness that the SS-20s had been de-
ployed and pronouncements that they were, indeed, a threat (see Smith,
1984a, 1984b, 1984c, 1984d). To underline the imaginary quality of
the threatened futures invoked by both East and West, in 1987, after
some six years of off-again on-again negotiations, the gap disappeared,
along with both sides’ missiles.5 As is true with most magical thinking,
the “gap” had never been real in any objective sense; it was created
through discourses of deterrence and the projection of imagined inten-
tions onto the “Other.” A whole world of the future was created out of
dreams, casting its unreal shadow on the present.6 Through virtual
exchange of nuclear weapons was mutual deterrence assured. As we
shall see, the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and its electronic
battlefield have problems of their own.
72 Chapter 4
Fighting the Next War
It is a well-known cliché that, in planning for the next war, generals

always fight the last one. One of the lessons of Vietnam seems to have
been that nuclear deterrence and discipline have little, if any, impact
on nonnuclear adversaries. The president of the United States could
hardly contemplate nuking a regional adversary—even one in putative
possession of a few atomic weapons—in response to a conventional
provocation. How, then, could s/he respond to an “unconventional
attack” with a small nuclear bomb in the mythical suitcase? On whom
could a retaliatory device be dropped? Who could be punished?7 For-
tunately for generals and strategists, the Gulf War intervened to sug-
gest some answers.
The classical image of war is one of a tightly controlled, well-
executed pas de deux between two enemies, using the most advanced
of weaponry, fighting along a well-defined front, each exerting maxi-
mum will. This is the idealized war, the AirLand Battle of NATO
(whose imagined clarity, Clausewitz warned us, would prove wholly
illusory if it came to pass), the conflict reimagined by Tom Clancy
(1987) in his mind-numbing Red Storm Rising. In that novel, Clancy
pits the brains of NATO against the brawn of the Warsaw Pact, and
NATO wins. The war turns out, however, to have been triggered by a
misunderstanding. The war games fought by General Norman
Schwartzkopf’s “Jedi Knights” and their counterparts in Iraq (Der
Derian, 1992) in preparation for an imagined conflict in the Gulf—one
that did take place—relied on a similar paradigm and, according to
some, was also the result of a “misunderstanding” arising from Am-
bassador April Glaspie’s replies to Saddam Hussein’s inquiries.
The wars to come, according to the conventional wisdom about
the RMA, will look a lot like these two, although they are unlikely to
be launched as a result of miscommunication. Fought out on electronic
battlefields, prosecuted by means of real-time intelligence and weap-
ons controlled through satellite uplinks, won by dint of superior tech-
nology, future wars will be something quite different but also much
the same (Cohen, 1996; Libicki, 1996). There will be a front line, but
our s/he-bots will face the enemy’s flesh-and-blood boys and girls.
Technological capital will protect political capital, but the basic cho-
reography will remain the same.
Or will it? Most of today’s discourses of war are, somewhat

paradoxically, characterized by conservatism in imagination even as
they are prosecuted with the as-yet uninvented weapons and strategies
of the future. These fantasies belie the form, moreover, of most con-
temporary wars, which follow Hobbesian lines more closely than
Cartesian ones (Kaplan, 1996). Planning for future wars requires some
idea of what they might look like, but where are we to look? Inasmuch
as both fortuna and fog play central roles in any battle, no two wars
can be alike, much less resemble one another. But because the “last
war” almost always comes as a surprise, in the absence of accurate
prognostication it usually stands in as the model for the next.
For better or worse, therefore, the Gulf War of 1991 has become
the current model for the future, as well as the standard against which
all debates are conducted (Libicki, 1996). This is not, it should be
noted, the type of conflict that is either most often imagined—if fan-
tasies are to be believed—or the most common—if newspaper column
inches are measured. As an interstate war for which a detailed account
is available, and with a clearly-defined enemy and set of front lines,
however, it is the most straightforward in terms of preparations and
buildup (see the first quote from the QDR above). That, too, is reason
enough that the Gulf War is unlikely to be repeated.
Even determining under what circumstances war might erupt or be
justified is itself problematic. Violation of fundamental material and social
norms among states, such as triggered the Gulf War, are exceedingly rare.
When one state invades another, the violation of borders is clear.8 A moral
outrage has taken place. More than this, such an infraction can be under-
stood as a threat to all states, even those with no immediate interest in the
violation. If a border can be crossed with impunity in one place, there is
no reason that it cannot happen elsewhere. Consequently, not only do
states react to border violations, alone and collectively, they also have
reason to fortify their defenses against potential violations by their neigh-
bors (for this is where it is presumed such attacks will come—but, be-
cause the United States has no overtly threatening neighbors, it is also
why U.S. strategy is so problematic). Given this reasoning, even though
Gulf-type wars might be quite uncommon, the safest bet is that the Gulf
War will occur again, somewhere, sometime.
This was the path pursued by the Bush and Clinton administra-
tions. In the early 1990s, a full review of U.S. strategy and forces was
74 Chapter 4
undertaken—the “Bottom-up Review”—with an eye toward rationaliz-

ing the military while cutting the defense budget. Out of this exercise
came the authoritative war-fighting strategy of the Clinton administra-
tion—and the official successor to containment—organized around
“major regional conflicts,” or MRCs (a concept recently rechristened
by Defense Secretary William Cohen as “major theater wars,” or
MTWs). An MRC/MTW is modeled roughly on the Gulf War expe-
rience, multiplied by two. More to the point, the MRC strategy as-
sumes the simultaneous outbreak of two such conflicts, for example,
a reprise of the Gulf War and the Korean War at the same time.
Although most strategic analysts agree that the probability of
such a scenario is rather low, others have argued that the beginning of
one regional war offers an opportune time for a regional “rogue,” such
as North Korea, to launch an attack. The United States therefore re-
quires a range of airlift, manpower, and light equipment capabilities
that would allow it to respond expeditiously to provocations with rapid
troop deployments, followed by the emplacement of large numbers of
troops and heavy battlefield weapons—but in less time than the six-
month buildup to the Gulf War. Whether American capabilities would
permit response to two MRCs at the same time remains unclear, with
the result that some propose a “block and hold” approach, whereby
regional wars would be fought and won sequentially.
The MRC/MTW strategy—and its essential restatement in the
1997 QDR and the 1998 secretary of defense’s Annual Report to the
President and the Congress—is best understood not so much as a war-
fighting plan as an effort to buttress the presumption of rationality in
order to avoid the supposed miscommunication that preceded the Gulf
War. It is also a (pre)cautionary tale for both friend and foe. Foes are
meant to be cowed by these capabilities and threats of retribution
should they try to change things—or so U.S. policymakers hope. The
loudly articulated American ability to wage the MRC/MTW strategy
is meant to incite in others imagined consequences and thereby pre-
vent them from ever launching a war. The outcome of the Gulf War,
and the repeated attacks on Iraq, serve as a morality tale for those who
might choose not to believe. This, in turn, relieves the United States
of having to fight such a war and, once again, conserves political
capital at home. For FOUS (Friends of the United States), the strategy
presents the world as a dangerous place, full of unseen although very
real enemies but, nonetheless, in good hands under American manage-

ment and tutelage. Meddle with this arrangement at the risk of loosing
chaos upon the land (as France found out when it demanded a larger role
in NATO by attempting to take over the European Southern Command).
What is absent from these discussions and plans is the “why?”
Why would so-called rogues—and these are the only countries that,
according to Washington, threaten U.S. forces, allies, or interests—
choose to do so? No rational reason can be given, and so irrational
ones are offered instead.9 They hate us, but for no reason, since we
have no designs on them. They desire vengeance, but for no reason,
since we have never offended them. They wish to injure us, but for no
reason, since they have only been injured through their interference
with our pursuit of order (a lesson more recently taught to Slobodan
Milosevic and Yugoslavia).
It is here that the MRC/MTW discourse of war, and the general
U.S. strategy, begin to collapse or, at least, run into conceptual trouble.
The MRC strategy assumes that all parties to a conflict operate on the
basis of the same rational calculus to which the United States adheres,
and that each side understands any given situation in similar terms. A
failure by the other party to respond appropriately is then attributed to
irrationality, insanity, or miscalculation—a “sane, rational” leader would
not risk such injuries to society or self—rather than a logic or ratio-
nality that we might not understand or to which we might not sub-
scribe.10 In seems safe to say that the number of wars begun by the
insane and irrational is probably quite small, and that so-called mis-
understandings (i.e., “human error”) are more frequently to blame.
More to the point, if insanity or irrationality are to blame for wars,
deterrence cannot work to prevent them.
But there is a much deeper flaw in the assumptions underlying
this discourse, as noted earlier. The failure to deter Iraq in 1990 and
1991 has been attributed to Ambassador April Glaspie and a lack of
clarity in the messages sent by the United States. The remedy was and
is to develop, deploy, and advertise capabilities so as to communicate
clearly, without question, the costs to enemies that would follow from
a violation of the status quo. To a determined government, however,
the prospective cost in money and lives of a Gulf-scale war might not
seem so great as to constrain it from launching an attack on U.S.
interests or allies or failing to respond with alacrity when the bombs
76 Chapter 4
start to fall. That much is clear from Iraqi behavior prior to, during and
after the Gulf War (and, more recently, by Yugoslavia’s), although it
is a lesson yet to be learned by U.S. policymakers. Furthermore, ra-
tionality and irrationality, sanity and insanity might not even be the
appropriate concepts to apply to this case. Assuming either rationality
or irrationality (and nothing else) disregards questions of deep causal-
ity in explaining the onset of wars, ignores what is clearly a result of
problematic histories of relations among and within states, and at-
tributes events as they inexplicably occur to factors beyond anyone’s
control (e.g, faulty genes, chemical imbalances, or Comet Hale-Bopp).
Other causal processes simply drop out.
This assumption of rationality—that a commitment of force (and the
threat of escalation) deters a rational opponent—was, nevertheless, central
to the Carter administration’s original “Rapid Deployment Force” (RDF)
later configured into the “Central Command” (CC) under General Norman
Schwarzkopf. It was, as well, the theory behind the military buildup prior
to the four-day war of January 1991. It remains the logic behind U.S.
disciplining of Iraq and others. Here, however, the conflation of nuclear
and conventional discipline becomes truly problematic.
The original purpose of the RDF/CC was to deter the Soviet
Union from launching an attack through Iran toward the Gulf. In that
imagined future, the RDF/CC was to have functioned as a tripwire (the
same function filled by the 300,000 U.S. troops then in Western Eu-
rope) whose triggering would lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
Working backward, then, it was the threat of imagined nuclear war that
would secure American interests in the Gulf and serve to prevent the
Soviets from initiating such an attack (but see Clancy, 1987). Accord-
ing to this logic, therefore, the threat to send military forces to oust
Iraq from Kuwait should have been sufficient to accomplish that end.
This latter theory was tested and found wanting because it relied on
nuclear threats backed up by virtual forces, and not conventional threats
backed up by material ones. That the Gulf tripwire was never intended
to be a “real” threat was originally indicated by the fact that the Cen-
tral Command existed only on paper and could never have made it to
the Gulf in time to become a nuclear sacrifice to Soviet aggression.
Here, then, was the flaw that is to be studiously avoided by the
MRC/MTW strategy. To make credible a threat to deploy and defeat
an opponent, not only must the United States have the capability to
deploy, it must also make manifest that capability without having

actually to deploy. This might be accomplished through war games,
rhetoric, and showing the flag, although such exercises suffer from
several potential costs. First, it is extremely expensive to maintain
such a capability, especially if it requires that troops and equipment be
stationed at some distance from potential arenas of conflict (as is the
case with the Central Command). Second, there is the very real chance
that one’s bluff might be called. One might then be forced to fight and
suffer casualties, on the battlefield and in the political wars at home.
These are the very things the MRC strategy with its capital-intensive
weaponry is meant to avoid. We might conclude, therefore, that the
strategy wants some rethinking.
Disciplinary Warfare
This leaves us with one remaining question: Is the Gulf War the arche-
type of future wars? Are the electronic battlefields of the MRC/MTWs
plausible? Or do they simply provide a distraction from lower-inten-
sity, higher-probability conflicts that are so much more difficult to
prevent or resolve? From this latter perspective, the wars in Chechnya,
the Balkans, Central Africa, and elsewhere might be more appropriate
as models, especially if predictions of continuing national fragmenta-
tion are borne out (see chapter 6). From a techno-warrior’s point of
view, however, Chechnya-like wars are of little interest and no conse-
quence. Combatants engaged in block-by-block urban combat, using
assault rifles, bazookas, and artillery of ancient provenance (relatively
speaking) are at high risk of injury or death. Such wars are messy,
difficult to orchestrate, and notoriously hard on weapons engineered
with high-precision mechanics and fancy electronics. Moreover, the
possibility of American involvement in such postmodern struggles—
even in a peace-keeping capacity—always appears to be an occasion
for policymakers to run for cover.
Postmodern warfare is, consequently, regarded by industrialized
country foreign ministries and militaries mostly as a nuisance; it is the
high-tech stuff that is sexy and porky. But, because “real” war is costly
and messy, it has become necessary to find a means of managing
wayward parties who fall out of line and violate the principles of a
78 Chapter 4
world order whose form and rules are not always so clear. So, even as
neighbors in far-away countries slaughter each other with clubs and
machetes, the tools of future wars between the United States and
unpredictable aggressors are on display in Time, Newsweek, The Econo-
mist, and on CNN. I call this disciplinary deterrence.
Disciplinary deterrence is executed through demonstration, through
publicity, through punishment. It is a means of engaging in war with-
out the discomforts or dangers of battle. It relies on imagined rather
than actual warfare, on the dissemination of detailed information about
military capabilities rather than on their actual exercise in combat, on
the proliferation of the image rather than the application of capabili-
ties. It is a child of the media age, taking advantage of rapid commu-
nication and virtual simulations that look all too real. It communicates
a none-too-subtle message to potential miscreants. Finally, in its appli-
cation to Iraq and more recently, Yugoslavia, disciplinary deterrence
warns others to stay in line (see chapter 7). There are other benefits to
be had from disciplinary deterrence, too. Expenditures on high-tech
equipment and strategies bolster local economies in important con-
gressional districts while reducing the demand for combat forces (see
Rochlin, 1997: chaps. 8–10; Kotz, 1988).
For the United States, the costs of disciplinary deterrence are
relatively low. The military equipment is in hand, because the defense
sector cannot be downsized any further without serious political costs.
Those in charge of the communications infrastructure, both military
and civilian, are only too happy to report on the amazing feats of
which the technology is capable (even if the information offered is
not always correct). And the elites of all countries—even “rogue
states”—pay close attention to CNN and other media outlets in order
to keep up with cultural and political attitudes and activities in the
United States.
The required publicity about the technology (although not about
tactics or intelligence) illustrates an emerging paradox associated with
disciplinary deterrence and warfare: Whereas countries once tried to
keep their military capabilities a secret, so as not to alert or alarm real
or potential enemies, it has now become common practice to reveal
such capabilities, in order to spread fear and foster caution. A typical
example of this can be found in advertisements that regularly appear
in The Economist. These are, presumably, read by elites and militaries
the world over. Northrop Grumman tells the reader about “information
warfare . . . the ability to exploit, deceive and disrupt adversary infor-
mation systems while simultaneously protecting our own. Example:
EA-6B Prowler” (emphasis in original).
Continues the advertisement
In the future, conflicts will be resolved with information as well
as hardware. Northrop Grumman has the capability to create and
integrate advanced Information Warfare technologies, such as
electronic countermeasures and sensors. Northrop Grumann. Sys-
tems integration, defense electronics, military aircraft, precision
weapons, commercial and military aerostructures. The right tech-
nologies. Right now.
Accompanying the text is a shadow of an “EA-6B Prowler” superim-

posed over an unidentfied landscape of land and water. The message?
“(Y)our bomb here.” With sophisticated computer graphics lending
verisimilitude to the scene, the weapons are once again used without
ever being fired.
The epistemological flaw in disciplinary warfare is that there is
no here there. For the most part, disciplinary warfare is conducted
against imagined enemies, with imaginary capabilities and the assumed
worst of intentions. As pointed out earlier, where these enemies might
choose to issue a challenge, or why, is not at all evident (while their
failure to issue a challenge is likely to be interpreted as “disciplinary
deterrence works!”). The only apparent reasoning is that we have what
they want and they are going to try to get it. Projection is a weak reed
on which to base policy or procurement.
In retrospect, the Central Command can be seen as the United
States’ first effort at conventional disciplinary deterrence. As I sug-
gested above, disciplinary deterrence is a fairly recent innovation;
prior to the 1950s, wars between countries were fought to retake lost
territory or acquire new land. The advent of nuclear weapons, and
their potential to destroy that which they were meant to protect,
made large-scale mass warfare highly risky, if not obsolete (Mueller,
1989). But, even smaller-scale wars, such as that in Vietnam or
Afghanistan, came to be less about territory or restoration of a status
quo ante than about the imposition of a particular moral order on the
local parties.
80 Chapter 4
The apotheosis of the disciplinary approach to war may have

taken place in 1991 therefore, when the American military machine, in
concert with the other members of the “coalition,” ousted the Iraqi
army from Kuwait without eliminating the regime that had violated
the rules (a feat repeated in the Balkans in 1999). The Bush adminis-
tration argued that the risk of Iraq’s fragmenting was too great to
engage in social engineering within that country, and that a collapse of
the regional “balance” could set off a land rush by predatory neigh-
bors. Perhaps.
More to the point, ever since that time, Iraq has existed in a state
of limited sovereignty, as a zone of discipline and domination that the
United States holds in semilegal bondage. The creation of “no-fly
zones” in Iraq’s northern and southern regions, the constant surveil-
lance of the country by satellites and spy planes, the regular (attempted)
inspections of its industrial facilities by UN representatives, the re-
peated vetoes on the restoration of even limited trade privileges, and
the periodic bombings have all reduced Iraq to a region over which the
United States exercises a suzerainty that extends even to domestic
affairs. But Iraq also fulfills a demonstration function, illustrating to
other rogues and adventurers their fate should they get out of line.
Even Iraq’s resistance plays into this game. Each time UN inspectors
are prevented from going about their work, the United States begins,
once again, to threaten punishment and war.11
This helps to explain, for example, the odd events of September
1996, when fighting took place in the Kurdish region in the north,
while the United States loosed its cruise missiles on Iraqi radar sta-
tions in the south (it also explains the largely ineffective four-day
bombing of December 1998). The U.S. response is best understood
not as retaliation for the Iraqi “invasion” of the Kurdish zone, but
rather as a punishment inflicted by the international equivalent of a
high-school vice principal, intended not just merely to hurt Saddam
Hussein but also to issue a warning to others who might think of
stepping out of line. “We can do this with impunity,” the White House
might have been saying, “You can run, but you cannot hide.” The
demonstration has become more important than the effect. The loss of
such opportunities would constitute a severe blow to U.S. policy (such
as it is).
W(h)ither War?
World War III has come and gone. Some of us didn’t even notice. Yet
its implements are still with us. Indeed, inasmuch as their production
is essential to the economies of many countries, they continue to pro-
liferate at an accelerating rate. What is the purpose of such weapons,
if not to wage shooting wars? War is costly in terms of lives lost and
capital destroyed, but peace has its own costs in terms of politics and
power. Interstate wars will come and go, no doubt, but not nearly as
often as some might believe. Still, the true believers can argue that the
absence of such conflicts after the Gulf War of 1991 is proof positive
that deterrence “works” and that the electronic battlefield, even when
restricted to computer and TV screens, will help to “keep the peace.”
But postmodern war is not about the borders between states or
even imaginary civilizations; as I proposed in chapter 3, it is about
those difficult-to-see boundaries between and among individuals and
groups. Who draws these lines? Who makes them significant? If they
cannot be mapped, how can they be controlled? And what about the
wars wracking so many far-away places? As we shall see in subse-
quent chapters, war as a disciplinary exercise is not limited to the
international realm or those living in “failed states”; it includes in its
application those at home, too.
5❖
MARKETS, THE STATE, AND WAR
According to a study published in 1995 by the World Bank, the “Wars

of the next century will be over water” (The Economist 1995b).1 Per-
haps. Such warnings are not new. By now, the invocation of “water
wars” is a commonplace, as a search of any bibliographic database
will attest.2 The Bank, however, conveys special authority with its
pronouncements, both because of its international standing as well as
its long involvement in the planning and development of “water re-
sources management.” Not only does the Bank rely on “experts” who
are presumed to know everything there is to know about water and its
use, as a central icon of the global economic system and a major
funder of large-scale water supply systems, it must also be listened to,
especially by those who may feel themselves short of water. But the
Bank’s analysis leaves a number of questions unanswered or, at least,
unsatisfactorily addressed.
For instance, who will fight over water? According to The Econo-
mist (1995b), wherein appeared an article on the study, the Bank’s
experts, and most other water scholars, believe that
the Middle East is the likeliest crucible for future water wars. A
long-term settlement between Israel and its neighbors will depend
83
84 Chapter 5
at least as much on fair allocation of water as of land. Egypt fears

appropriation of the Nile’s waters . . . by upstream Sudan and
Ethiopia. Iraq and Syria watch and wait as Turkey builds dams in
the headwaters of the Euphrates.
It is clear that the combatants will be states.

But why would states fight over water? On this point, the Bank’s
reasoning is less clear. On the one hand, it is taken for granted that
water is scarce in absolute terms, and that people and states (according
to conventional economic and political analysis) naturally come into
conflict over scarce resources.3 On the other hand, geography (or, to
be more precise, Nature) has not seen fit to have rivers, drainages, and
mountains remain constrained within the confines of national bound-
aries. Indeed, rivers act as excellent borders between countries because
they are such prominent geographic features and are difficult to cross—
although it is true that they have a tendency to wander back and forth,
now and again. Nonetheless, the combination of geopolitical and neo-
classical logics leads to the conclusion that, if resources are essential,
scarce, and “in the wrong place,” states that lack them will go to war
with states that have them.4 QED.
What, then, is the solution offered by the Bank? Markets in
water. But here emerges a paradox. First, we are warned of potential
struggles over Nature’s scarcity and the possibility of war between
sovereign entities. Then, quite suddenly, we are transported from the
“State of Nature” to the nature of markets. In Nature, people fight and
often come out losers; in markets, they bargain according to self-
interest and come out winners. Thus, according to the Bank’s Vice-
President for the Environment, the avoidance of water wars is to be
found in what he calls “rational water management”—that is, in the
transmogrification of economics from a doctrine of absolute scarcity
and consequent conflict arising from the maldistribution of state sov-
ereignty over resources to one of relative scarcity and exchange of
resources—in this instance, money and water—between sovereign
consumers in peaceful markets.
How is this amazing transformation of interstate relations to be
accomplished? Quite simply: through the “appropriate pricing” of water
at its “true” marginal cost—although it is seldom noted that the “true”
marginal cost of water to people defending the national patrimony
Markets, the State, and War 85
may be incalculable. This move, argues the Bank, will lead to the
assumption of water’s “proper place as an economically valued and
traded commodity” which, in turn, will result in efficient and sustain-
able use through technologies of conservation. As the author of the
Economist article puts it (with no sense of irony whatsoever), “the
time is coming when water must be treated as a valuable resource, like
oil, not a free one like air.” Not, perhaps, an ideal parallel—especially
insofar as the Persian Gulf War was more about the political impacts
of oil prices than absolute supply (Lipschutz, 1992a, 1992b)—but the
point is well taken: it is probably better to truck and barter in natural
resources than it is to fight for them—if these are the only choices
available.
The Bank’s program for peace is based, of course, on a neoliberal
economic framework; indeed, recalling the injunction of Franklin
Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, one might say “if water
does not cross borders, soldiers will.” Trade is offered here as the
solution to imagined wars, as a way to prevent conflicts that threaten
but have not yet (and might never) occur.5 Yet, is it not conceivable
that prognostications that predict water wars could drive the contend-
ing parties to another form of market-based exchange—in weapons—
thereby heightening tension among them and bringing the prophecy to
fulfillment? Or is it true that discourses do not kill people; people kill
people?
In this chapter, I examine the prospect of “resource wars,” a topic
often framed as “environment and security” or “conflict and the envi-
ronment” (see, e.g., Gleditsch, 1997). I first present an exegesis of the
“nature of sovereignty and the sovereignty of nature,” with particular
reference to geopolitical discourses of sovereignty, scarcity, and secu-
rity offered from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. I
begin with a brief examination of the ideas of the classical geopolitical
scholars—Mahan, Mackinder, Spykman, Gray—and the ways in which
they sought to naturalize the relationship between geography and state
power in order to legitimate efforts to redress scarcity through military
means.
I then turn to a discussion of sovereignty and property. I argue
that sovereignty is best understood as a mode of exclusion, as a way
to draw boundaries and establish rights of property against those who
would transgress against the sovereign state. Paradoxically, perhaps,
86 Chapter 5
although sovereignty is at the core of the state system, its exclusivity

sets up the very dilemmas of control and scarcity that geopolitics finds
so problematic and conducive to struggle.
The solution to this geopolitical dilemma was (and is) reliance
on yet another naturalizing discourse, that of the market. Markets
require the uneven distribution of resources and goods in order to
function properly. Indeed, Malthus may have been “right,” as one
environmentalist bumpersticker claims, but scarcity, as we define it
today, is a necessary condition for markets and property rights to
function. For better or worse, however, neomercantilist power politics
stands in the way of free exchange. What then to do?
Following World War II, the diffusion of “embedded liberalism”
by the United States throughout the world helped to disseminate a new
geopolitics that has, more recently, come to rely on the concept of
interdependence in order to maintain the fiction, if not the fact, of
political sovereignty. In recent years, as a result, we have seen the
emergence of discussions of, on the one hand, “limits to growth” and
“sustainability” and, on the other, “environment and security,” both the
direct descendants of earlier geopolitical discourses. As such, these
discourses assume or attempt to reinstate sovereign boundaries where,
perhaps, none should exist.
Geopolitics and “Natural Selection”

Scholars of the “science” of geopolitics believed that national au-
tonomy and control were to be valued above all, and that to rely on
the goodwill of others, or the “proper” functioning of international
markets, was to court national disaster. Besides, territories could not
be bought and sold; as parts of integral nation-states, they might be
wrested or stolen in battle, but they were not for sale at any price.6
Classical geopolitics was a product of its time, the Age of Imperialism
and Social Darwinism, not the more-contemporary Ages of Liberalism
and Ecology (which are, nevertheless, related ideologies). It is no
coincidence that the best-known progenitors of geopolitics were citi-
zens of those Great Powers—Britain, Germany, the United States—
who sought to legitimate international expansion and control through
naturalized ideological covers.
Classical geopolitics regarded the power, prosperity, and pros-

pects of a state as fixed by geography and determined by inherent
geographical features that could not be changed.7 As Nicholas J.
Spykman (1942:41) put it,
Power is in the last instance the ability to wage successful war,

and in geography lies the clues to the problems of military and
political strategy. The territory of a state is the base from which
it operates in time of war and the strategic position which it
occupies during the temporary armistice called peace. . . . Ministers
come and ministers go, even dictators die, but mountain ranges
stand unperturbed.
To give some of these scholars their due, not all treated geography as
so fully binding on state autonomy and action. Halford Mackinder
(1919/1962), an Englishman, was initially less of a geopolitical deter-
minist than the American Spykman (1942; 1944). But World War II
hardened the views of both, inasmuch as Germany’s efforts to expand
appeared to vindicate Mackinder’s dictum about “heartland” and
“rimland” powers (a dialectic later picked up by Colin Gray).8 Follow-
ing World War II, a more vulgar geopolitical determinism came to
dominate much realist theorizing as well as foreign policy analysis
(Lipschutz, 1989; Dalby, 1990), rooted in no small degree in the sen-
timents of George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” (Gaddis, 1982).
Such determinism became a routine part of every document to
emerge from U.S. councils of strategy and counsels of war. A not
untypical example can be found in NSC 94, “The Position of the
United States with Respect to the Philippines”:
From the viewpoint of the USSR, the Philippine Islands could

be the key to Soviet control of the Far East inasmuch as Soviet
domination of these islands would, in all probability, be fol-
lowed by the rapid disintegration of the entire structure of anti-
Communist defenses in Southeast Asia and their offshore island
chain, including Japan. Therefore, the situation in the Philip-
pines cannot be viewed as a local problem, since Soviet domi-
nation over these islands would endanger the United States’
military position in the Western Pacific and the Far East (cited
in Lipschutz, 1989:103).
88 Chapter 5
More recently, Colin Gray (1988:15), quite possibly the last of

the classical geopoliticians, argued that
because it is rooted in geopolitical soil, the character of a country’s

national security policy—as contrasted with the strategy and means
of implementation—tends to show great continuity over time,
although there can be an apparently cyclical pattern of change.
If Gray’s claim is correct, the facts of national fate are written in

Nature. At the risk of national (or natural) disaster, there cannot be,
and must not be, any struggle against such facts. Gray simply takes
boundaries—in this case, those between the United States and the
Soviet Union that, three years later, would cease to exist—as given
and as “natural” as the “geopolitical soil” in which they are drawn. (In
a subsequent book, Gray naturalizes culture as a product of geography
in order to warn that the United States, as a maritime power, must
remain on guard against Russia, a “heartland” power; see Gray, 1990.)9
The Age of Imperialism was also the age of Social Darwinism,
as noted earlier, rooted in Charles Darwin’s ideas about natural selec-
tion, but extended from individual organisms as members of species to
states. John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge (1995:57) argue that
naturalized geopolitics [from 1875 to 1945] had the following

principal characteristics: a world divided into imperial and colo-
nized peoples, states with “biological needs” for territory/resources
and outlets for enterprise, a “closed” world in which one state’s
political-economic success was at another’s expense . . . , and a
world of fixed geographical attributes and environmental condi-
tions that had predictable effects on a state’s global status.
According to German philosophers, states could be seen as “natural”

organisms that passed through specific stages of life. As a result,
younger, more energetic states would succeed older, geriatric ones on
the world stage. In order not to succumb prematurely to this cycle of
Nature, therefore, states must continually seek advantage over others.10
As Simon Dalby (1990:35) puts it
[S]tates were conceptualized in terms of organic entities with

quasi-biological functioning. This was tied into Darwinian ideas
of struggle producing progress. Thus, expansion was likened to

growth and territorial expansion was ipso facto a good thing.
British and American geopoliticians held a somewhat different per-

spective, seeing progress tied to “mastery of the physical world” through
science and technological innovation (for more recent invocations of
this idea, see Simon, 1981, 1996; Homer-Dixon, 1995). But Nature
was still heavily determining:
[B]efore the First World War, the current European geopolitical

vision linked the success of European civilization to a combina-
tion of temperate climate and access to the sea. Temperate cli-
mate encouraged the inhabitants to struggle to overcome adversity
without totally exhausting their energies, hence allowing progress
and innovation to lead to social development. Access to the sea
encouraged exploration, expansion and trade, and led ultimately
to the conquest of the rest of the world. (Dalby, 1990:35)
Both perspectives—organic and innovative—helped to legitimate

imperial expansion, colonialism, and conquest. The “life cycle” argu-
ment demanded adequate access to the material resources and space
necessary to maintain national vitality—hence the German demand for
colonies and, later, Lebensraum. The “struggle to survive” required
both overseas outposts and physical position to command the vital
geographic features that would provide natural advantage to those who
held them—hence, British garrisons from Gibraltar to Hong Kong, the
Canal Zone and Philippines under American suzerainty, French con-
trol of North Africa.
Geopolitics was a “science” well-suited to the neomercantilism
and gold standard of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
One hundred years of industrialization in Europe had provided the
impetus to policies of state development as well as territorial unification
under the rubric of “nation.” Each nation was the autochthonous off-
spring of the land where it lived—which created problems for those
nations, such as the Germans, who were scattered throughout Central
and Eastern Europe. Thus the national territory was not only sacred
but “natural.” Only those within the natural borders of the nation-state
could be mobilized to serve it and only those who were naturalized—
that is loyal to the nation-state—could be relied on to support it. It is
90 Chapter 5
no accident that borders, so fluid during the age of sovereigns, became

rigid, with passports required, during the age of sovereignty.
The ethnic cleansings and population transfers of the twentieth
century illustrate this point. Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of national
self-determination helped to further this process by extending the mythic
principle of organic nation to all those who could establish a recog-
nized claim to such status. Where competing claims arose within specific
territories, the strong tried to assimilate, eliminate, or expel the weaker
(see chapter 6). We continue to observe this process in many places
around the world, even as markets have rendered borders porous and
control over them problematic (see, e.g., Strange, 1996). Indeed, as I
have suggested in earlier chapters, the “culture wars” that have spread
through a number of industrialized countries over the past decade are
as much about restoring the mental borders of the nation as it is about
expelling those with alien ideas and identities (Lipschutz, 1998b).
Passports can be falsified; “true” beliefs cannot.
The fundamental erosion of state sovereigny by markets is no-
where seen more clearly than in the realm of genetics, where the
geopolitical discourse of states has been transformed into a “geopoli-
tics of the body.” The invocation of Nature to demonstrate the supe-
riority of human groups is not a new phenomenon, and can be traced
at least as far back as the ancient Greeks. During the past one hundred
years, Darwin’s theories of evolution were used to legitimate the ge-
netic superiority of some races and nations over others. The latter form
of naturalization was greatly delegitimated as a result of its application
by the enthusiasts of eugenics, but it has reemerged in a somewhat
different form over the past twenty years or so in efforts to link IQ to
academic and financial success (e.g., Herrenstein and Murray, 1994).
This new genre of naturalization—genetic determinism—has devel-
oped as both science and ideology, and its parallels to older geopoliti-
cal and organic theories of nation and nationalism are worth noting.
The contemporary scientific basis for genetic determinism is found
in the various research efforts that seek to understand the basis for
various congenital diseases and inherited characteristics, culminating
in the Human Genome Project (Wingerson, 1991). The ideological
manifestation, however, reflects a virtually pure version of liberal
methodological individualism in its framing, to wit, an individual’s
potential is almost wholly inherent in her/his genetic inheritance. Twin
and sibling studies seem to suggest that society and environment are
at best minor contributors to that potential, with the result that, in
effect, one is already of the “elect” at birth (so one would do well to
be careful in choosing one’s parents; Dahlem Workshop, 1993; but see
also Harris, 1998).
As is true with geography and the state, an individual’s “natural”
inheritance is critical to that person’s development. But the ways in
which this particular (and not terribly innovative) insight is being used
politically are rather alarming.11 In particular, genetic determinism is
helping to reinstantiate a vulgar Hobbesian-genetic “war of all against
all,” in which the individual has no one to blame but herself for anything
that might befall her in the marketplace of life. Inasmuch as the state has
been banished from this realm (except as a declining source of research
funds), there is no one to turn to for protection against predation by
others with superior genetic endowments or sufficient cash (Hanley,
1996). Another version of this ideology extrapolates natural inheritance
back to race and ethnicity, arguing that society has no responsibility to
redress historical inequities inasmuch as these are largely genetic in
origin. Again, it is sink or swim in the genetic marketplace.
In this world of hyperliberal Nature, as a result, a new form of
sovereignty accrues to the individual. Here, control is exercised by those
with good genes—which are scarce—or those who have the wealth to
acquire them via the purchase of new medical techniques. Because in
the marketplace, wealth is power, money is also the key to preventing
oneself from being contaminated by “bad” genes carried by the poor, the
ill, the defective, or the alien. Such quality is transmitted, of course, into
one’s offspring. As with classical geopolitics, the naturalized discourse
of genetics follows the dominant ideology of the day and, in some of its
more extreme expressions, involves an almost complete move of the
“natural rights” associated with sovereignty from the state to the indi-
vidual. The result is that sovereignty as an attribute of the state is dis-
integrating in both material and ideational terms.
Sovereignty, Property, Interdependence
What, exactly, is “sovereignty”? Although the term continues to be the

focus of vociferous controversy (Biersteker and Weber, 1996; Litfin,
92 Chapter 5
1998)—especially as it appears to many to be “eroding”—here I fol-

low Nicholas Onuf’s (1989) lead and conceptualize it as a property of
liberalism. Onuf cites C. B. Mcpherson’s description in this regard:
The individual is free inasmuch as he is the proprietor of his

person and capacities. The human essence is freedom from de-
pendence on the will of others, and freedom is a function of
possession. Society has a lot of free individuals related to each
other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have
acquired by their exercise. (Mcpherson, 1962:2, quoted in Onuf,
1989:165)
Onuf (1989:166) points out that “States are granted just those proper-
ties that liberalism grants to individuals,” among which are real estate,
or property (this is easier to understand if we recall that, for the origi-
nal sovereigns of the seventeenth century, states were property; see
Elias, 1994). In a liberal system, individuals holding property are entitled
to use it in any fashion except that which is deemed harmful to the
interests or welfare of the community (Libecap, 1989; Ruggie, 1993).
Indeed, this is precisely the wording of Principle 21 of the Stockholm
Declaration: States have the right to exploit their own resources so
long as this does not impact on the sovereignty of other states by
constituting an illegal intrusion into the jurisdictional space of other
states.12 What this implies, therefore, is not only that sovereignty over
property is important, so also are the boundaries constituting property.
Inside the boundaries of property, the state, like the individual land-
owner, is free from “dependence on the will of others”; outside the
boundaries, it is not. That, at least, is the theory.
Practice is quite different. The individual property owner finds
her sovereignty not only hedged about with restrictions but also sub-
ject to frequent intrusion due to others’ wills. Indeed, the state has the
prerogative of violating the sovereignty of individual private property
in any number of settings and ways. These can range from investiga-
tions into the commission of crimes on, in, or through the use of
specific personal or real property, to the creation of public rights-of-
way for highways, pipelines, and communication cables, to the taking
of property in the greater social “interest”—subject, of course, to just
compensation (markets are involved only so far as setting the “value”
of the property is concerned). In these situations, an owner of affected
property has little recourse except to courts (or rebellion). Such is the
power of law.
The state, by contrast, has freed itself from such legal niceties
through the fictions of international “anarchy” and “self-help,” which
comprise the essential elements of the doctrine we call realism. This
permits the state to physically resist violations of its property, on the
one hand, while declaring a national “interest” in violating the prop-
erty of (usually) weaker states, on the other. Realism and national
interests legitimate a state’s right to transgress boundaries, notwith-
standing the Stockholm declaration and other international laws of a
similar bent.
For reasons that are beyond the scope of this chapter, egregious
physical violations of territorial property and sovereignty are increas-
ingly frowned on (Jackson, 1990). This has not, however, led to a dimi-
nution in violations of sovereignty; it simply means that such violations
are legitimated under other names or processes (Inayatullah, 1996). Recall,
for example, that the distribution of resources among states is uneven,
a condition often blamed on Nature and geography, with the result that
one state finds itself needing to acquire such resources through interac-
tion with another. This state of affairs is sometimes characterized as
ecological interdependence, a situation whereby state borders, charac-
terized as “natural” under sovereignty and anarchy, fail to correspond to
those of physical and biological nature (Lipschutz and Conca, 1993). It
is the tension between the sovereignty of Territory and the sovereignty
of Nature that sets up the basis for problems such as “water wars” in the
first place. Below, I will examine the concept of ecological interdepen-
dence more closely; here, I only point out that, while it is often taken
to describe a physical phenomenon—the existence of ecological phe-
nomena or ecosystems extending across national borders—the term may
actually serve to obscure relations of domination and subordination
between the states in question.13
As the Nazi finance minister, Count von Krosigk, put it in 1935,
If we fail to obtain through larger exports the larger imports of
foreign raw materials required for our greatly increased domestic
employment, then two courses only are open to us, increased
home production or the demand for a share in districts from which
we can get our raw materials ourselves. (Quoted in Royal Insti-
tute of International Affairs, 1936)
94 Chapter 5
Inasmuch as rights of property inherent in state sovereignty reify the

possession or control of a resource, neighboring states who may find
the resource “scarce” for lack of access to or control of it also find
themselves in a condition of relative powerlessness with respect to it.
Their only recourse in such a situation is to physically capture the
resource or to purchase property rights to it and thereby “legally”
come to control it.
Scarcity and the “Limits to Growth”
There is no need to recount in detail the geneology of “scarcity” as a

concept (even Thucydides mentions it; see 1954:10; also Dalby, 1995);
suffice it to say that it is central to the theory and practice of neoclas-
sical liberal economics. Here, I want to consider the relationship be-
tween scarcity and boundaries or, rather, between the conditions that
differentiate absolute from relative scarcity, and the politics associated
with both. Historically, people responded to a lack of food and water
in a specific location, due to drought or war, by moving. But, while
such conditions might lead to localized conflict or social instability, it
is less clear that such deficiencies were causal factors in organized
violence or war. The starving are rarely strong enough to wage war,
and soldiers and guerillas cannot fight if they are weak from hunger
(as evidenced by reports concerning the distribution of scarce food
supplies in famine-ridden North Korea). Revolutions and rebellions
are led by those who are better off and, we can presume, lacking
neither for food nor water in absolute terms.
Continuing the argument made above, therefore, relative scarcity
can be seen as a product of control, of ownership, of property, of sov-
ereignty, of markets. Economists tell us that absolute scarcity does not—
indeed, cannot—occur if and when markets are operating properly, and
that all scarcity is relative. Thus, in an “efficient” market, free of politi-
cal intervention, when the supply of some good runs low, its price will
rise and people will seek less expensive substitutes.14 Doomsayers, such
as the Reverend Malthus and the Professors Meadows and Ehrlich, have
thus been attacked for ignoring the rules of supply and demand (Simon,
1996). But if we insert boundaries into our equation, it turns out that the
doomsayers do have something germane to say.
Malthus (1803) was a prophet of absolute scarcity. As is well

known, he argued that geometric population growth would eventually
outstrip the arithmetic growth of agricultural production. This would
result in circumstances whereby food would run short in absolute
terms, leading to widespread starvation and death. His analysis has
been—and continues to be—criticized for not taking into account ei-
ther basic economics or technological innovation, but these criticisms
are not very fair. As a cleric, Malthus was undoubtedly more interested
in distribution than in markets or capital and, from a strictly ecological
perspective, he was right: when food runs short, populations crash.15
But it is less than clear that, for human societies, such crashes can be
described as “natural.” Most animal populations have recourse neither
to markets nor the means of moving food from one place to another.
They can move or change foods, of course, but if all neighboring
niches are occupied and alternative foods are being consumed by oth-
ers, the game may well be up.16
A similar notion of absolute scarcity was promulgated several
centuries later by Dennis and Donella Meadows and their colleagues
(Meadows, et al., 1972; Meadows, Meadows, and Randers, 1992) at
MIT. They concluded that, given then-current trends in nonrenewable
resource production, reserves, and consumption, and barring unfore-
seen circumstances or discoveries, the world would run short of vari-
ous critical materials sometime during the twenty-first century. Meadows
and his colleagues were also harshly attacked for ignoring the same
factors as did Malthus. To the satisfaction of many, they were soon
“proved wrong” by events. Even today, economists still take pleasure
in pointing this out but, again, there was a sense in which the
Meadowsists were not really interested in ecology, economics, or in-
novation, either.
What both crude Malthusianism and more sophisticated
Meadowsism disregarded was the matter of distribution of resources—
that is, for whom would food and minerals be scarce? And why would
such scarcity matter? Certainly, it is by no means clear that the deple-
tion of global cobalt supplies would matter as much to Chinese peas-
ants as Cambridge academics. For this error, in any event, Meadows
and his colleagues should be forgiven; economists tend to dismiss the
same point, too, regarding distribution as a problem outside of their
realm of concern and one that, in any event, can be addressed by
96 Chapter 5
economic growth. Their supply and demand curves do no more than

illustrate the premise that, if scarcity drives prices rise too high relative
to demand, markets will be out of equilibrium and no one will buy.
Eventually, sellers will have to lower their prices, and buyers will be
able to eat again.
The reality is slightly more complicated, inasmuch as even prop-
erly functioning markets can foster maldistribution and relative scar-
city. As Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen (1989; see also Sen 1994) have
pointed out, not everyone starves during a famine—indeed, food is
often quite plentiful. What crude market analyses don’t take into ac-
count is that, even at market equilibrium, there may be those for whom
prices are still too high. Those who have money can afford to buy,
those who do not, starve. Scarcity is only relative in this instance, but
some people (and countries) do go hungry.
In other words, relative scarcity is also a condition of bound-
aries, in this instance political, cultural or social ones. In some in-
stances, these lines are found between the physical personas of
individuals: I am of one caste (class, ethnie, religion); you are of
another. My money and food are mine (or of my group), not yours (or
your group’s). In other cases, the lines are drawn between countries:
this land (and water) is ours, not yours. At both extremes, the money,
food, land, water, and whatever else must be kept inside that boundary
in order to maintain individual and collective integrity, identity, and
sovereignty—that is,
if I give you my money, so that you can buy food, I will have less
and will not be able to live the way to which I am accustomed.
This will lessen me. In doing this, I will also acknowledge a
relationship with you that infringes on me and even acknowl-
edges my obligations to you. If I do this, then I will not be who
I have been because I will have yielded some of my autonomy to
you. Moreover, because you have no money, you cannot buy from
me; and because I have as much as I need, I don’t have to buy
from you. Hence, I can remain sovereign and strong.
Or
If we give you our water, so that you can grow food, we will have
less and will not be able to live the way in which we have been
accustomed. Then we will not be who we have been because we

will have yielded some of our sovereignty to you. This will make
us weaker.
In other words, the resources must remain sovereign property. The

transfer of anything across a boundary—whether physical, political,
social, cultural, or economic—serves to acknowledge the existence of
a legitimate Other and thereby lessens sovereignty—that is, control
and autonomy, whether individual or collective—in an absolute sense.
It also creates social relations between and among actors that have
little or nothing to do with markets or anarchy (but, see Wendt, 1992).
This is to say that sovereignty, whether individual or national, is
about exclusion, autonomy, and keeping the Other out, both physically
and mentally. It is also why uneven distribution is so central to inter-
national politics: it helps to perpetuate the hierarchy of power that,
notwithstanding the acrobatics of neorealists, are central to interna-
tional politics. That was the purpose of the princes’ agreement at
Westphalia; that is the point of the reification of methodological indi-
vidualism today. Inside my boundary, I/we can act as we wish; outside
of it, I/we can’t. By redrawing or, in some circumstances, abolishing
lines, we could change this premise, but that would mean sharing what
we have with others and having less for ourselves. It would change us.
This is why autarchy—the abolition of relative scarcity through
a redrawing of lines of control—was long the dream of realists and
policymakers. But autarchy is economically costly and markets are
politically costly. Interdependence, whether economic, ecological, or
military, is one way of finessing this problem without redrawing bound-
aries, yielding sovereignty, or changing identity.
Embedded Liberalism and Interdependence
As I noted in chapter 3, after 1945 the United States found it useful

to create the “Free World” in order to propagate economic liberalism
beyond national markets. But creating such an imagined community
was a difficult proposition. To institutionalize liberalism throughout
the American sphere of influence required that states yield some por-
tion of their individual sovereignty in two ways, both in the name of
democracy and prosperity: to the systemic level, in the name of de-
98 Chapter 5
fense and free markets, and to the individual level, in the name of
human rights and exchange in the market. The first move constrained
states from asserting too strongly their autonomy and defecting from
the Free World by offering them increased wealth and the threat of
helplessness if they tried to defect. The second strengthened the bonds
of interest between the Free World, as an emergent natural community,
and sovereign individuals by offering the same.
Conditions within this Free World economic area did not consti-
tute “interdependence” as that concept was eventually articulated; rather,
they were a manifestation of the Gramscian hegemony of the United
States (Augelli and Murphy, 1988; Gill, 1993). The geopolitical dis-
course developed during the 1970s and 1980s to explain the conditions
of the 1950s and 1960s invoked “hegemonic stability theory” to ex-
plain why this condition was good and right (Kindleberger, 1973;
Gilpin, 1981; Keohane, 1984; Kennedy, 1988). It is helpful to jump
ahead of our story for a moment to consider the “double hermeneutic”
of hegemony.17 Originally, the concept was formulated as a term of
socialist opprobrium, and used primarily by the Peoples’ Republic of
China against both the United States and the USSR, but during the
period between about 1975 and 1988, which corresponded to the pe-
riod of generalized worries about American decline (Kennedy, 1988;
Nye, 1990), hegemony was naturalized and given positive attributes.
A “hegemon” now became a state destined for power and domi-
nance as a result of the “natural” cycles of history and global political
economy, and that took on the burdens of global economic and politi-
cal management under anarchy (a description that, quite logically, fit
the United States; see, e.g., Goldstein, 1988). The hegemon did this
through the establishment of international regimes (Krasner, 1983)
and, in so doing, served not only its own interests, first and foremost,
but also those of allied countries, who were nonetheless free-riding on
the hegemon. Under the skillful hands of non-Marxist scholars of
international political economy (Gilpin, 1981), domination was thereby
transmuted into a kind of benevolent stewardship—although some of
these same scholars worried about what might happen to this particu-
lar world order “After Hegemony” (Keohane, 1984). The free riders,
however, failed to appreciate the benefits and their good fortune in
acquiescing to U.S. “leadership” (Strange, 1983) and, Americans ar-
gued, their reluctance to share the burden played a major role in the
political disorder of the 1970s and the renewed Soviet threat during of
the 1980s. Ungrateful wretches! The United States—the champion and
protector of naturally free men [sic] and markets—had only the best
interests of its allies in mind when it manipulated, disciplined, or
coerced them.
“Interdependence theory,” most closely associated with Robert
O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr., was an academic product of the
times (the 1970s) and its politics (the energy crisis), rather than an
“objective” description or model of “reality.” On the one hand, inter-
dependence theory tried to account for what seemed to be the end of
American hegemony over the Free World, after the dollar devalua-
tions, the end of dollar convertibility to gold, and the oil embargo of
the early 1970s. On the other hand, it sought to justify certain policies
and actions that might otherwise be politically unpopular at home and
abroad. But, whereas hegemony theory derived in large part from
realism, interdependence theory was liberal in origin (although, as
Robert Keohane (1984) has demonstrated time and again, the two are
perfectly compatible).
Indeed, in their 1977 book Keohane and Nye proposed that “In-
terdependence in world politics refers to situations characterized by
reciprocal effects among countries or actors in different countries”
(1978/1989:8) What did they mean by “reciprocal effects”? Writing
toward the end of the 1970s, in the aftermath of the first runup in oil
prices, they clearly had the distribution problem in mind. The United
States no longer owned sufficient oil under its private sovereignty,
within its national boundaries, at an acceptable price; others owned
too much and were offering it at too high a price. No one paid atten-
tion to the reciprocal effects on others of too much oil at too low a
price, a condition that led originally to the establishment of OPEC in
the early 1960s, some decades later to the Gulf War of 1990-91
(Lipschutz, 1989:129),18 and that has since resulted in the disappear-
ance of several of the Seven Sisters (the major oil companies). For the
United States, the “reciprocal effect” was primarily a problem of do-
mestic politics, the threat of a disgruntled electorate forced to queue
and pay twice or thrice the accustomed price for a gallon of gas. A few
hot-headed analysts and policymakers proposed taking the oil back,
inasmuch as it was “ours.” Cooler heads prevailed, but the United
States was no longer the same nation as it had been prior to 1973.
100 Chapter 5
Keohane and Nye further distinguished between sensitivity and

vulnerability. If you are sensitive, they said, you feel the pain of an
action by another but you can recover—that is, through adaptation you
can eliminate the temporary infringement on your autonomy, sover-
eignty, and identity imposed by others. Then it is back to business as
usual. If you are vulnerable, however, you feel the pain but cannot
recover—your autonomy and sovereignty have been breached for good
and you have been changed. You are now constrained within a rela-
tionship with the Other that, as much as you might dislike it, has
served to establish a new element of your identity in terms of the
Other (Wendt, 1992; Mercer, 1995). To be sure, such a merging of
identities can exacerbate the sense of those differences that remain, a
phenomenon most evident in the clash between religious fundamental-
isms and human secularisms. But the two identities have become
mutually constitutive, not oppositional; as with an old married couple,
neither can maintain her/his identity unbound from the other. By con-
trast, interdependence connotes transactions across boundaries and,
consequently, some degree of separateness. To speak, then, of interde-
pendence is to make an effort to eliminate the breaches in boundaries
between oneself and others—through markets, if at all possible—rather
than to adapt to this new condition of mutual constitution.19
Whatever the merits of the distinction made by Keohane and
Nye, however, both sensitivity and vulnerability posit impacts across
borders, infringements on autonomy, and reductions in sovereignty. To
eliminate either type of intrusion, adjustments must occur inside the
boundaries—in the realm of domestic politics—so that the boundaries
can be restored. Hence the contradiction: interdependence is accept-
able if it allows us to maintain the boundaries and our national sov-
ereignty; unacceptable if it does not. At best, this is a word game, at
worst, a form of false consciousness that serves to perpetuate domina-
tion. Or, as Edward Said has written,
[T]his universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar

space which is “ours“ and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours”
which is theirs is a way of making geographical distinctions that
can be entirely arbitrary. (Said, 1979:54, quoted in Dalby, 1990:20)
In this manner lines are drawn around “natural” communities—that is,

ones united by characteristics or culture whose origins are, suppos-
edly, lost in history—alienated from one another by virtues of these

differences.
Keohane and Nye (1977/1989:7) acknowledged (but deplored)
the ideological content of the concept of interdependence when they
wrote:
Political leaders often use interdependence rhetoric to portray

interdependence as a natural necessity, as a fact to which policy
(and domestic interest groups) must adjust, rather than as a situ-
ation partially created by policy itself. . . . For those who wish the
United States to retain world leadership, interdependence has
become part of the new rhetoric, to be used against both eco-
nomic nationalism at home and assertive challenges abroad.
(Emphasis added)
Paradoxically, perhaps, the rhetoric and theory of interdependence

was also intended to reinforce boundaries without sealing them off as
those at home and abroad might wish. The unit of analysis remained the
sovereign state; the impacts posited by Keohane and Nye impinged on
states rather than individuals, classes, or other groupings; the responses
would be taken by policymakers in the “national interest.”
Consequently, political policies in response to these effects took
the form of state-led actions. Thus, for example, the oil embargo of
1973 and subsequent price hikes were presented as being directed
against countries and their citizens, portrayed as homogenous entities,
even though there were differential effects within and across the target
states and on people (see chapter 3). Politicians fulminated about OPEC
taking “our oil” and infringing on “our sovereignty,” even though the
oil was “owned” by multinational corporations and stockholders, based
in the industrialized states, who profited handsomely as prices rose.
And state-led policies to redress these conditions—President Nixon’s
ill-fated Project Independence; President Carter’s Synfuels Corpora-
tion, both the subject of fierce domestic attack for their intervention
into highly profitable oil markets—were presented as schemes to re-
duce Americans’ reliance not on petroleum, per se, but on the petro-
leum that the United States did not control.
For other countries, the rhetoric of interdependence did not sig-
nal the equalization of power relations among allies so much as a U.S.
effort to rationalize anew its “natural” leadership of the Free World.
102 Chapter 5
This coincided—not by accident—with the first stirrings of renewed

Cold War, marked by the rise of the second Committee on the Present
Danger (Sanders, 1983), the collapse of détente, and the political and
academic reification of hegemonic stability theory. The erosion of
boundaries around the world led to the effort to reinforce them in
Central Europe, through emplacement of Euromissiles (see chapter 4)
and similar activities elsewhere. By the end of the 1970s, the discourse
of economic interdependence had dissolved, to be replaced by
reassertions of sovereignty and autonomy under Jimmy Carter and
Ronald Reagan, and legitimation of their policies through the newly
created discourse of hegemony. You cannot, however, fool Mother
Nature.
Limits to Sustainability?
The Stockholm Declaration was quite explicit about the environmental

rights and responsibilities of states. States were sovereign entities where
resources and environment were concerned and they were expressly
forbidden to engage in activities that negatively affected the sover-
eignty—the property rights—of other states. What, in practice, did this
mean? First, states possessed the absolute right to do whatever they
wished with the natural resources located within their boundaries.
Second, states were absolutely enjoined from doing anything with
their resources that would somehow affect the sovereignty of any other
state. Third, because the environment was not subject to these imag-
ined boundaries, states were admonished to protect it within the con-
ditions implied by the first two principles. In other words, the Stockholm
Declaration reiterated the absolute impermeability of the boundaries
of states as a condition of protecting the environment.
While there were (and are) any number of contradictions embed-
ded in these principles, three stand out. First, in spite of long-standing
evidence that Nature “respects no borders,” the agreements signed at
Stockholm in 1972, at Rio in 1992, and elsewhere during the interven-
ing twenty years and since continue to reify the state as the sole
appropriate agent of control, management, and development where
environment is concerned. Second, the Stockholm Declaration grants
to the state or its international agents the absolute right to discipline
nonstate actors when degradation of environment and natural resources

is involved—rather than the other way around—even to the point of
appropriation through coercion (Peluso, 1992, 1993). That this might
lead to further degradation, rather than protection, as well as ever
greater concentrations of power in the hands of those who encourage
degradation, has never been immediately obvious and certainly has
never been an argument that diplomats and policymakers have wanted
to hear. And third, it has the effect of reinforcing the natural separation
of political units rather than fostering the mutual and respectful rela-
tionships between them that might serve better the goal of environ-
mental protection.20
The reification of borders and sovereignty as “natural” has thus
had two difficult-to-reconcile consequences where environmental pro-
tection is concerned. On the one hand, as is often recognized, it frag-
ments jurisdictions that might better be treated as single units. Therefore,
sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants in the midwestern United
States are a domestic regulatory problem when they rain out in the
Northeast, but an international transboundary problem when they rain
out a few miles further on, in Canada. On the other hand, in order to
address such transboundary issues, this reification mandates “coopera-
tion” among states, who prefer to protect their individual economic
prerogatives. Under these conditions, cooperation is described as
“difficult” and “unnatural,” because it goes against the grain of so-
called anarchy (which is the term used to naturalize antagonism) and
requires that states yield up a measure of their domestic sovereignty
in order to address the consequences of the infringements on sover-
eignty enjoined by the Stockholm Declaration and periodically reiter-
ated since then.
Both the rhetorics of “ecological interdependence” and “sustain-
able development” can thus be interpreted as responses to the onto-
logical difficulties posed by Stockholm. More to the point, they can
both be understood as direct descendants of the geopolitical discourses
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1987, the Brundtland
Commission (also known as the World Commission on Environment
and Development, or WCED) proposed that “The Earth is one but the
world is not,” and argued that the “world in which human activities
and their effects were neatly compartmentalized within nations” had
begun to disappear (WCED, 1987:4).21 The commission further sug-
104 Chapter 5
gested “that the distribution of power and influence within society

[sic; which society is not made clear] lies at the heart of most envi-
ronmental and development challenges” (1987:38) In other words,
according to the commission, even though the sources of the prob-
lems of environment and development were to be found at both
supra- and subnational levels, sustainability would nonetheless de-
pend on states acting within and across boundaries, even when it was
not evidently in their interest, ability, or willingness to do so. The
continued resistance of the United States to actually controlling its
emissions of greenhouse gases is testimony to the faintness of this
particular hope.
A more fundamental difficulty, however, has to do with who
decides what is sustainable? From a crude ecological perspective,
sustainability is frequently defined as a rough equivalence between
inputs and outputs. This, it is widely assumed, is equivalent to condi-
tions in the state of Nature that are naturally “balanced.”22 To exceed
this balanced condition for too long, or by too much, will run up
against natural limits and lead to the outstripping of supply by de-
mand. From an economic (and nineteenth-century organic) perspec-
tive, however, growth is “natural” and “good” (see chapter 7).
Consequently, sustainability rests on the continued accumulation of
capital—and technology—that can be used to substitute for depleted
resources or to rise above such limits. In its famous definition of the
“solution,” the Brundtland Commission (WCED, 1987:8) finessed this
problem by including both conceptions and ignoring the contradic-
tions between them:
Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable—to

ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compro-
mising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
The concept of sustainable development does imply limits—not
absolute limits but limitations imposed by the present state of
technology and social organization on environmental resources
and by the ability of the biosphere to absorb the effects of human
activities.
The naturalization of biospheric limits, whatever they might be, are

balanced in this definition by the naturalization of both technology and
social organization that know no limits. These, in turn, are to be dis-
covered by recourse to markets that will—how is never specified—

find a balance between needs and growth (WCED, 1987:44).
The second response to the ontological problem of boundaries
and sovereignty—the conflation of statist realism and methodological
individualism—is no more helpful. States fight over natural resources
such as water because, as Peter Gleick (1994:8) has put it, “of its
scarcity, the extent to which the supply is shared by more than one
region or state, the relative power of the basin states, and the ease of
access to alternative freshwater sources.” In other words, the “cause”
of water wars is distribution, not supply, per se. The prevention of
water war lies in “formal political agreements” that will address the
distribution problem, through the allocation of property rights to water
and the appropriate pricing of water in markets among the apparently
“rational” users (Gleick, 1994).
Voila! Those naturalized factors that lead to interstate competi-
tion and war in the first place are subsumed by processes of economic
competition and exchange in naturalized markets. These, it is pre-
sumed, will produce more efficient and, therefore, more peaceful out-
comes. As I suggested earlier, however, the problem of unequal
distribution will not go away; it will simply be shifted to those who
lack the power to make trouble. Sustainability will thus come to be
defined not by the justice of distribution but by the judgement of
markets. Ecological interdependence will fall before wealth rather than
force of arms, as the rich disempower the poor. The boundaries will
be naturalized once again and sovereignty restored to its rightful place
in the hierarchy of Nature.
What Does It Mean to Be “Natural”

Where States Are Concerned?
In the search for the causes of social conflict, both peaceful and vio-
lent, there is often the temptation to look for the things that can be
counted, rather than the things that really count.23 It is easier to calcu-
late per capita availability of water, or the welfare requirements of
immigrants, than to change the social relations and hierarchies of power
and domination that characterize states and societies. It is easier to
invent rhetorics and discourses that, somehow, obfuscate and natural-
106 Chapter 5
ize the inequities inherent in these relationships than to point out and
act on the notion that, although things might be as they are, they do
not have to remain that way. And, it is always easier to ascribe the
causes of unpleasant conditions or events to a mysterious and deter-
ministic history or Nature than it is to unravel the complications of a
political economy that spans the globe while reaching into every nook
and cranny where there are human beings.
Markets, the state, and war are not “natural,” and to believe or act
otherwise is to affirm the status quo as the best of all achievable
worlds. All three are human institutions and, as such, are constructed
and mutable. This is why water wars and water markets can be so
easily juxtaposed in the language and reasoning of liberalism and
neoclassical economics, even though creating open, transborder mar-
kets in water will not necessarily lead to “water peace.” After the dust
settles, it will probably be more “efficient” for Palestine to sell its
water to Tel Aviv than use it for West Bank agriculture. Water will then
flow across borders, becoming scarce on one side and plentiful on the
other, thanks to control by markets rather than the military. How the
people of Hebron and Nablus will feel about that remains to be seen.
6❖
THE SOCIAL CONTRACTION
Since the end of the Cold War, culture and identity have become
prominent explanatory variables in international politics (see, e.g., Lapid
and Kratochwil, 1996). Among the proponents of this notion are Ben-
jamin Barber (1995), Robert Kaplan (1996), and Francis Fukuyama
(1995a, 1995b). The best known, perhaps, is Samuel P. Huntington
(1993; 1996), with his “clash of civilizations.” He (1996:19, 20) ar-
gues that
the years after the Cold War witnessed the beginnings of dramatic
changes in peoples’ identities and the symbols of those identities.
Global politics began to be reconfigured along cultural lines. . . . In
the post–Cold War world flags count and so do other symbols of
cultural identity, including crosses, crescents, and even head cov-
erings, because culture counts, and cultural identity is what is
most meaningful to most people.
In this and other recent works, both culture and identity have been
invoked in essentialist terms, as factors that are as invariant as the
earth on which they stand. States once came into conflict over raw
materials (or so it is said; see Lipschutz, 1989; Westing, 1986); today
107
108 Chapter 6
they are liable to go to war over unfinished idea(l)s. Straits, peninsu-

las, and archipelagos were once the objects of military conquest; today
religious sanctuaries, languages, and national mythologies are the
subjects of occupation and de(con)struction. The result appears to be
a new type of geopolitics, one that invokes not the physical landforms
occupied by states but the mental platforms occupied by ethnies, re-
ligions, and nations.
In line with such geoculturalism, most of the forty or so wars that
have erupted since 1989 have been characterized, both analytically and
in the popular press, as “ethnic” or “sectarian,” oriented largely around
conflict between cultures. Ordinarily, the origins of such wars are
pictured as too ancient and arcane for the citizens of the modern world
to understand, inasmuch as the “irrational” cultural factors deemed to
be their cause have changed very little over time and no longer make
any sense. The most that can be done, according to such logic, is to
let them “burn out.” For the most part, however, such categorizations
serve more to expel combatants from “history” than to explain what is
going on, why such wars are taking place, or what might be done to
stop or prevent them.
More to the point, not only are essentialist cultural explanations
unhelpful, they are wrong. So-called ethnic and sectarian conflict are
artifacts of changes within states driven, to no small degree, by forces
associated with recent social transformations linked to global integra-
tion and external pressures for economic liberalization. Moreover, the
fragmentation afflicting “weak” states, such as those in the Balkans,
Central Asia, and Africa (Kaplan, 1996), is only the very visible tip of
an iceberg that includes even those “strong” countries that are so promi-
nent in the new global economy, including the United States (Rupert,
1997; Crawford and Lipschutz, 1998). As I suggested in chapter 2,
political fragmentation and integration are part and parcel of the same
process; they are part of a dialectic whose overall consequences can-
not, as yet, be foreseen.
I begin this chapter with a discussion of standard explanations of
recent civil wars and conflicts, and offer a somewhat different account
of why such wars have broken out. I then take up the matter of state
survival in an era of economic competition, liberalization, and deregu-
lation, discussing the ways in which these economic processes foster
both integration and fragmentation, and how this dialectic plays itself
The Social Contraction 109
out in many places, threatening, perhaps, a proliferation of statelike

entities. Next, I ask how many states are enough? Whereas, from the
perspective of already existing states, there are too many to permit the
creation of more, from the vantage of proto-states there are too few
states, and reopening the books is an absolute necessity.
The key question is, of course, too many or too few for what? I
suggest here that, perhaps, there are too many states from the security
perspective, and too few from the economic and cultural perspectives.
Finally, I address the structural difficulties posed by those rules and
norms of the international state system governing the establishment of
new states. As posed in chapter 3, those rules are premised on exclu-
sivity—indeed, the state system requires exclusivity if it is to operate
as an anarchy—and, short of a return to a full-service welfare state
that can overcome the centrifugal forces inherent in the pursuit of
individual self-interest, we are faced here with an insoluble situation
in which units of exclusivity will only get smaller and smaller until
they can no longer divide.
Is There Ethnic Conflict?
For our purposes, it is possible to identify five general “theories” of

ethnicity that have something to say about the conflicts that result
“when ethnies collide.”1 The first suggests that ethnicity is biological.
Proponents of this view argue that ethnic tensions are, somehow, “natu-
ral.” Observes one scholar, “people reflexively grasp at ethnic or na-
tional identifications or what passes for them” (Rule, 1992:519). An
alternative formulation, which falls back on sociobiology, argues that
“the urge to define and reject the other goes back to our remotest
human ancestors, and indeed beyond them to our animal predecessors”
(Lewis, 1992:48).
Another view, enunciated some years ago by then-secretary of
state Warren Christopher, reiterated by Huntington (1993; 1996), and
invoked by President Clinton (1999) to explain the bombing of Yugo-
slavia in 1999 cites “long histories” and primordiality, accounting for
the emergence of ethnic politics and violence by invoking “centuries”
of accumulated hatreds among primordial “nations.” Such hatreds, goes
the argument, have exploded into war as a consequence of the end of
110 Chapter 6
the Cold War and the disappearance of the repressive mechanisms that
kept them from boiling over for four decades. Indeed, as can be seen
in the cases of Croatia and Serbia, Kosovo, South Asia, and other
places, such invocations, akin to a form of historical materialism, serve
to “naturalize” ethnic consciousness and conflict almost as much as do
genetic and biological theories. Inasmuch as we cannot change histori-
cal consciousness, according to this view, we must allow it to work its
logic out to the bitter end.
A third perspective, most closely associated with Benedict Ander-
son (1991), but elaborated by others, is the idea of the imagined com-
munity. This view suggests that ethnicity and ethnic consciousness are
social constructions best understood as the “intellectual projects” of a
bourgeois intelligentsia. These projects arise when elites, using new
modes of communication, seek to establish what Ernest Gellner (1983)
has called a “high culture” that is distinctive from other, already ex-
isting ones (see also Mann, 1993). Such individuals are, not infre-
quently, to be found in the peripheral regions of empires or states,
excluded from the ruling apparatus by reason of birth or class. Be-
cause they are highly educated, peripheral intellectuals may be offered
opportunities to assimilate into the ruling class, but to reach the top
levels, they must renounce completely all of their natal culture. At the
same time, these elites are also often aware of the cultural and political
possibilities of an identity distinct from that of the center, in which
they can play a formative role. Ethnicity, from this view, is cultural,
and not inherently violent. But violence may develop when two ethnies,
such as Jews and Palestinians, claim the same territory.
A fourth perspective is the defensive one (Lake and Rothchild,
1998). Here, the logics of the state and state system begin to come into
play. Historically, states have been defined largely in terms of the
territory they occupy and the resources and populations they control.
Hence, the state must impose clearly defined borders between itself
and other states. To do this, the state must plausibly demonstrate that
other states and groups pose a physical and ideological threat to its
specific emergent “nation.” Herein, then, lies the logic for the
politicization of group identity, or the emergence of “ethnicity” and
“ethnic conflict”: self-defense.2
The last view is instrumental: Ethnicity is the result of projects
meant to capture state power and control. But such a project is not, as
we shall see, totally ahistorical, as rational-choice theory might lead us

to believe. Rather, it is a response to the logics of the state system and
globalization, drawing on historical and cultural elements already
present (and sometimes free floating) within societies, and invoking
“threats” (usually imagined) posed by other real or emergent ethnicities
as a reason for its own formative and offense-oriented activities
(Ra’anan, Mesner, Armes, and Martin, 1991). One might ask why such
antagonisms are necessary; wouldn’t communal autonomy suffice?
Efforts to provide national/cultural autonomy to ethnic and religious
groups were tried in the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, but failed
ultimately because they did not provide to these groups the power
accorded to the dominant identity group in those empires and their
subunits (Gagnon, 1995). Once the European state system became
well-established and spread, only through a “state of one’s own” was
it possible and desirable to acquire such power and position (Lipschutz,
1998a).
All of these theories focus on cultural difference as the source of
conflict and violence, and this view reaches its apotheosis in the work
of Huntington (1996:21), who argues that
people define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language,

history, values, customs and institutions. They identify with cul-
tural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, na-
tions, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics
not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity.
We know who we are only when we know who we are not and
often only when we know whom we are against. (Emphasis added)
In Huntington’s schema, culture, identity, and what he calls “civiliza-

tion” are defined not through associational values, but in terms of
enemies and what people are not. This is problematic for two reasons.
First, there are many cases of cultures coexisting peacefully for ex-
tended periods of time. Second, Huntington assumes cultures not only
to be stable but also static.
While anthropologists continue to have serious disagreements
about the definition of culture, we can define it here as the combina-
tion of social factors—norms, rules, laws, beliefs, relationships neces-
sary to the reproduction of a society—with material factors that help
produce subsistence and foster accumulation. Cultural functionalism is
112 Chapter 6
largely out of style in anthropology because it seeks to explain all

features of a culture and its development by their specific purpose in
production and reproduction. But such functionalism lies at the core of
the geocultural perspective, whose advocates see ethnicity and culture
as roughly equivalent to other countries’ supplies of raw materials and
military technology. Huntington’s elements of culture fit this schema,
although he regards those elements as basic and functionally common
to all societies, rather than contextual and contingent. In addition to
objecting to such deterministic functionalism, the anthropologist would
also point out that cultures are neither static nor stagnant, and that
major changes in internal and external environments are likely to dis-
rupt an apparently stable society and make it into something else (as
I argued with respect to security in Chapter 3). Huntington, however,
seems to believe that cultures and civilizations, like continents and
oceans, are immutable and forever (see Gray, 1990).
The parallels between classical geopolitics and geocultural politics
have been noted in a number of places (see, e.g., Tuathail, 1997). As I
suggested in chapter 5, the classical geopolitics of Mahan, Mackinder,
and Spykman operated as a discourse of power and surveillance, a means
of imposing a hegemonic order on an unruly world politics. Cold War
geopolitics divided the world into West and East, good and evil, with
perpetual contestation over the “shatter zones” of the Third World (adrift
in some cartographic purgatory of nonalignment). Today, these neat
geographic boundaries can no longer be drawn between states and across
continents, and the shatter zones are to be found within countries as well
as consciousnesses. Yet, Huntington’s book (1996:26–27) offers tidily
drawn maps whose geocultural borders, with a few exceptions, follow
modern boundaries between states (a few oddities do show up hither and
thither: an outpost of “Hindu civilization” in Guyana; Hong Kong re-
mains “Western” in spite of its then forthcoming reunification with
China; Circumpolar Civilization is entirely missing).
There is yet another paradox here: In spite of its very material
objectives (and, we must assume, substructure), geoculture, according
to Huntington’s conceptualization, seems to lack any material basis.
To be sure, geoculture is connected to great swaths of physical terri-
tory, “civilizations” much larger than the states that occupy those spaces,
but neither geoculture nor these civilizations have any evident material
or even institutional existence. The Islamic umma imagined by some
and feared by others is much larger than the states it encompasses but,
between Morocco and Malaysia, it is riddled by sectarian, political,
economic, and social as well as cultural differences, even down to the
local level.
Geoculture shows no such variegation. People simply identify
with those symbols—“crosses, crescents, and even head coverings”—
that “tell them” who they are. Culture and identity, twinned together,
thereby come to operate as a sort of proto-ideology, almost a form of
“false consciousness.” And because ideologies are, of necessity, mutu-
ally exclusive, they must also be unremittingly hostile to one another.
The inevitable conclusion is the “clash” predicted in Huntington’s title,
and the replacement of the Cold War order with a new set of impla-
cable enemies driven by an incomprehensible (and “irrational”) sys-
tem of beliefs.
The imputation of such explanatory power to geoculture is not
only theoretically invalid, it is also empirically incorrect. Most of the
violent conflicts underway around the world today are domestic and
involve often-similar ethnic, religious, or class-based groups, strug-
gling to impose their specific version of order on their specific soci-
eties. Such social conflicts do appear to be contests for hearts, minds,
and bodies, and combatants seem to feel no remorse in eliminating
those whom they cannot convert—indeed, conversion is rarely an option.
While most observers and policymakers view these wars as manifes-
tations of chaos that must be “managed” (as detailed in Crocker and
Hampton, 1996), it is perhaps more illuminating to see them as very
much a product of contemporary (or even “postmodern”) times (Luke,
1995). What passes for culture in these wars is, at best, an instrumen-
tal tool for grabbing power and wealth.
Postmodern social warfare has thus been mistakenly character-
ized as war between “cultures.” Huntington (1996) goes so far as to
use the carnage in Bosnia as an archetype for his predictions of “clashes
between civilizational cultures,” pointing to the “fault line” between
Western and Orthodox Christianity as one of the “flash points for
crisis and bloodshed.” Yet the tectonic metaphor is flawed. Just as
earthquake faults are often notable for their invisibility prior to an
event, such cultural fractures in Bosnia were, according to most re-
ports, hardly apparent prior to 1990 (Gagnon, 1995). Moreover, except
for periodic and usually infrequent tremors, faults tend to be very
114 Chapter 6
quiet. Drawing on Freud’s notion of the “narcissism of small differ-

ences,” it appears that culture wars are more likely to erupt between
those whose ascriptive differences are, initially, minor but that can be
magnified into matters of life and death and then reified so as to seem
eternal and immutable (Lipschutz, 1998b).
Still, how else are people to decide who is deserving of good?
How else can one account for success and failure? And what else is
one to do when success and failure seem to contradict the rules and
expectations of one’s experience? As one scholar of the “ideology of
success and failure” in Western societies puts it,
Society is considered to be “in order” and justice is considered

“to be done” when those individuals, in general, attain success
who “deserve” it, in accordance with the existing norms. If this
does not happen, then people feel that “there is no justice” or that
something is basically wrong. (Ichheiser, 1949:60, quoted in Farr,
1987:204)
At the extreme, rationalization of such displacement may take one of

two forms: self-blame or scapegoating. Self-blame is more common in
the United States, given the high emphasis placed on individualism
and entrepreneurism, but self-blame can also generate anger that is
externalized onto scapegoats. Who or what is attacked—other coun-
tries, minorities, immigrants, or particular economic or political inter-
ests—depends on how the causes of displacement are explained and
understood, and which narratives carry the greatest logical weight
(Hajer, 1993). Academic models that explain job loss by comparative
advantage and other such theories are, generally speaking, unintelli-
gible to all but trained economists. Putting the blame on specific in-
dividuals or groups is much easier and has “the function of replacing
incomprehensible phenomena by comprehensible ones by equating their
origins with the intentions of certain persons.” (Groh, 1987:19).
Nevertheless, what ultimately happens in a specific country or
place is permitted, but not determined, by overarching macrolevel struc-
tures. Violence is not inevitable. Such structures function, rather, by
imposing certain demands and constraints on domestic possibilities. In
such situations, people are offered the opportunity to make meaningful
choices about their future, choices that do not involve constrained
identities (Todarova, 1998). The problem is that political and eco-
nomic changes of virtually any type usually cut against the grain of
prior stratification and corporatism. From the perspective of those who
have benefited from such arrangements, any change is to be opposed.
If Not “Culture,” What Then?
The problem with the views and theories offered above is that, taken
individually, each is incomplete. To be sure, ethnicity, religion, and
culture have played prominent roles in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka,
Kashmir, Nigeria, Algeria, Georgia, Angola, Kosovo, Chechnya, and
so on, but they are better understood as contingent factors, rather than
either fundamental triggers of intrastate wars or ends in themselves.
Each theory provides some element of the whole, but none, taken
alone, is sufficient. Moreover, each assumes that the phenomenon we
call “ethnicity” or “sectarianism” is, necessarily, the same today as it
was 50, 200, or even 1,000 years ago. But the systems within which
these phenomena and wars have emerged in recent years have not been
static and, to the extent that systemic conditions impose changing
demands and constraints on domestic political configurations, today’s
“ethnicity” must be different from even that of 1950. But how?
As indicated by a growing body of research (Crawford and
Lipschutz, 1998), we must look beyond the five arguments to account
for the implosion of existing states and the drive to establish new ones
out of the pieces of the old. The causes of recent and ongoing episodes
of social conflict are obviously correlated with the end of the Cold
War,3 but they have been fueled in no small part by large-scale pro-
cesses of economic and political change set in train long before 1989.
Specifically, as I argued in chapter 2, changes in the international
“division of labor,” economic globalization, and the resulting pressures
on countries to alter their domestic economic and political policies in
order to more fully participate in the “community of nations”—all
processes that began during the Cold War—have had deleterious ef-
fects on the relative stability of countries long after its end.4
As I noted in earlier chapters, Barry Buzan (1991) has argued
that the state is composed of three elements: a material base, an ad-
ministrative system, and an idea. He suggests that the “idea” of the
state is equivalent in some way to nationalism, although he does not
116 Chapter 6
examine closely the role of the state itself, or its elites, in creating and
sustaining this idea. What has become more evident in recent years is
that nationalism (or “patriotism,” as it is called in the United States)
is only the public face of a very complex citizen/civil society/state
relationship. In industrialized, democratic countries, flag waving, an-
them singing, and oath taking are public rituals that visibly unite the
polity with the state. Such rituals can extend even to sports and similar
activities, as evidenced by the nationalist hoopla that surrounds the
supposedly internationalist Olympic Games.
There is, however, more to this relationship than just ritual; there
is a substructure, both material and cognitive, that might be called a
“social contract.”5 This is an implicit understanding of the quid pro
quos or entitlements provided to the citizen in return for her loyalty to
the idea, institutions, and practices of the state (see chapter 8). All
relatively stable nation-states are characterized by political and social
arrangements that have some form of historical legitimacy. The idea of
the “social contract” is, conventionally, ascribed to Rousseau (1968)
and Locke (1988), who argued that the state is the result of what
amounts to a contractual agreement among people to yield up certain
“natural” rights and freedoms in exchange for political stability and
protection. Locke went so far as to argue that no state was legitimate
that did not rule with the “consent of the governed,” a notion that
retains its currency in the contemporary Washington consensus for
“democratic enlargement” (Clinton, 1997; Mansfield and Snyder, 1995,
offers a more skeptical view of this proposition). Rousseau’s theory of
the origin of the state owed much to the notion of consent, as well,
although he recognized that some sovereigns ruled through contempt,
rather than consent, of the governed. Both philosophers also acknowl-
edged the importance of material life to the maintenance of the social
contract.
My use of the term here is somewhat different, in that it does not
assume a necessarily formalized expression of the social contract.
Sometimes, these contracts are codified in written constitutions; at
other times, they are not inscribed anywhere, but are found instead in
the political and social institutions of a country (as in the United
Kingdom or Israel). In either case, a social contract structures the
terms of individual citizenship and inclusion in a country’s political
community, the rules of political participation, the political relation-
ship between the central state and its various regions, and the distri-
bution of material resources within the country and to various indi-
viduals. Social contracts also tend to specify the roles that people may
occupy within the country and society, and the relationships between
these roles.
Quite often, these social contracts are neither just, equitable, nor
fair. They are nevertheless widely accepted, and people tend not to
dispute them actively, if only because such opposition can also affect
their own material position and safety. The social contract is, there-
fore, a constitutive source of social and political stability within coun-
tries, and its erosion or destruction can become the trigger for conflict
and war. I do not claim that these social contracts are necessarily
respectful of human rights or economically efficient; only that, as
historical constructs, they possess a certain degree of legitimacy and
authority that allows societies to reproduce themselves in a fairly
peaceful manner, over extended periods of time.6
Within the frameworks established by such social contracts, we
often find stratified hierarchies, with dominators and dominated, pow-
erful and powerless. Frequently, these roles and relationships have
what we would call an “ethnic” or “religious” character as, for ex-
ample, in the traditional caste system in India, or the “ethnic divisions
of labor” once found throughout the lands of the former Ottoman
Empire, institutionalized in the millet system, and still present through-
out the Caucasus and Central Asia (as well as in some American cities;
see Derlugian, 1998). Historically, these hierarchies have tended to
change only rather slowly, on a generational scale, unless exposed to
sudden and unexpected pressures such as war, invasion, famine, eco-
nomic collapse, and so on.
What is crucial is that these arrangements help to legitimate, in
a Gramscian sense, the political framework within which a society
exists, thereby reinforcing the citizen/civil society/state relationship.
External threats to the nation and its inhabitants—whether real or
imagined—can help to consolidate these social contracts as well as to
facilitate changes deemed necessary for the continued reproduction of
state and society. Threats make it possible to mobilize the citizenry in
support of some national “interests” as opposed to others. Threats also
help to legitimate domestic welfare policies and interventions that might,
under other circumstances, be politically controversial and disruptive.
118 Chapter 6
The introduction into societies of radical changes that take effect

over shorter time spans can, however, destabilize, delegitimize, and dis-
solve long-standing, authoritative, and authoritarian structures and rela-
tionships very quickly, as in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989,
Yugoslavia in 1991, and Indonesia in 1998. A transition to market or-
ganization or democracy represents one such change; the collapse of a
kleptocracy, another. The former provides, for example, an economic
environment within which some individuals and groups can, quite quickly,
become enriched, while others find themselves being impoverished, as
in the case of post-Communist Russia. But even where markets and
democracy are long established, as in the United States, economic lib-
eralization, certain forms of deregulation (and reregulation), and
hyperliberalism can also have the effect of undermining social stability
and generating political dissatisfaction and alienation. These kinds of
changes disrupt the rule-governed basis of people’s behavior and expec-
tations, sending them in search for new rules, old rules, or no rules
(Lipschutz, 1998a, 1998b). The past beckons at those times when change
is pervasive; the present becomes illegitimate, nostalgia replaces rea-
soned discourse, politics becomes venal and, sometimes, violent.
To make the point once again: it is not that external pressures are
wholly to blame; rather, the political and social changes required of
countries whose leaders and elites, both old and new, wish to partici-
pate more fully in the changing global economy tend to destabilize the
“social contracts” and make them vulnerable to particular types of
political mobilization and violence. As Georgi Derlugian (1995: 2) has
put it, the causes of conflicts usually labeled “ethnic” are
to be found in the prevailing processes in a state’s environment,

that may be only tenuously divided into “external”—the interstate
system and the world economy—and “internal” which, according
to Charles Tilly, shapes the state’s structure and its relation to the
subject population and determines who are the major actors within
a particular polity, as well as how they approach political struggle.
But the consequent dynamics are almost wholly internal. Serge

Moscovici (1987:154) has argued that
everyone knows what constitutes the notion of conspiracy. Con-
spiracy implies that members of a confession, party, or
ethnicity . . . are united by an indissoluble bond. The object of

such an alliance is to foment upheaval in society, pervert societal
values, aggravate crises, promote defeat, and so on. The con-
spiracy mentality divides people into two classes. One class is
pure, the other impure. These classes are not only distinct, but
antagonistic. They are polar opposites: everything social, national,
and so forth, versus what is antisocial or antinational, as the case
may be.
And Dieter Groh (1987:1) points out that
human beings are continually getting into situations wherein they

can no longer understand the world around them. Something
happens to them that they feel they did not deserve. Their suffer-
ing is described as an injustice, a wrong, an evil, bad luck, a
catastrophe. Because they themselves live correctly, act in an
upright, just manner, go to the right church, belong to a superior
culture, they feel that this suffering is undeserved. In the search
for a reason why such evil things happen to them, they soon come
upon another group, an opponent group to which they then at-
tribute certain characteristics: This group obviously causes them
to suffer by effecting dark, evil, and secretly worked out plans
against them. Thus the world around them is no longer as it
should be. It becomes more and more an illusion, a semblance,
while at the same time the evil that has occurred, or is occurring
and is becoming more and more essential, takes place behind
reality. Their world becomes unhinged, is turned upside down,
[sic] in order to prevent damage to or destruction of their own
group (religion, culture, nation, race) they must drive out, render
harmless, or even destroy those—called “conspirators”—carrying
out their evil plans in secret.
That such conspiracies are bizzare, imagined, or socially constructed

hardly matters if and when shooting starts. Bullets do kill.
Political Entrepreneurs and Social Contraction
Faced with pressures and processes that mandate change in domestic

arrangements, both those who would lose status and those who would
120 Chapter 6
grasp it tend to see power in absolute and exclusionary terms. In order

to limit the distribution of potential benefits, and to mobilize political
constituencies in support of their efforts, such people often fall back
on social/cultural identities that do incorporate ethnic, religious, and
class elements. Rapid social, economic, and political changes create
new opportunity structures for those who are in a position to take
advantage of them.7 These “political entrepreneurs” are usually well-
educated members of the professional classes or intelligentsia. As David
Laitin (1985:302) puts it, they know
how to provide “selective incentives” to particular individuals to

join in the group effort. Communal groups will politicize when
there is an entrepreneur who (perhaps instinctively) understands
the constraints to organization of rational individual behavior.
In other words, a political entrepreneur is one who is able to articulate,

in a coherent and plausible fashion, the structure of opportunities and
constraints that face a specified group of people as well as the poten-
tial costs of not acting collectively. Such appeals have been especially
persuasive in “times of trouble,” when societies are faced with high
degrees of uncertainty, and particular groups within societies see their
economic and social prospects under challenge. It is under these condi-
tions that we find domestic differences emerging and developing into
full-blown social conflict and warfare.
To put the argument more prosaically, in social settings that are
“underdetermined”—where rules and institutions have broken down or
are being changed—opportunities often exist for acquiring both power
and wealth. There are material benefits to social solidarity. Kinship
can function as a form of social capital, establishing relations of trust
even where they have not existed previously (Fukuyama, 1995a, 1995b).
The political mobilization of ethnic, religious, and cultural identities is
one means of taking advantage of such opportunities. Consequently,
people do not grasp “reflexively” for their essential ethnic identity
when political power and authority crumble. Instead, exclusive and
oppositional identities, based on ethnic, religious, and class elements
whose meaning is never too clear, are politically constructed and made
virulent as those in power, or those who would grasp power, try to
mobilize populations in support of their struggles with other elites for
political power, social status, and economic resources (Laitin, 1985;

Brass, 1976; Crawford and Lipschutz, 1998).
As René Lemarchand (1994:77) has written in his insightful study
of conflict and violence in Burundi,
The crystallization of group identities is not a random occur-

rence; it is traceable to specific strategies, pursued by ethnic
entrepreneurs centrally concerned with the mobilization of group
loyalties on behalf of collective interests defined in terms of kin-
ship, region or ethnicity. . . . Clearly, one cannot overestimate the
part played by individual actors in defining the nature of the
threats posed to their respective communities, framing strategies
designed to counter such threats, rallying support for their cause,
bringing pressure to bear on key decision makers, and, in short,
politicizing ethnoregional identities.
And, he (1994:77) continues,
The essential point to note is the centrality of the state both as an

instrument of group domination and as an arena where segments
of the dominant group compete among themselves to gain maxi-
mum control over patronage resources. So from this perspective
the state, far from being a mere abstraction, emerges as a cluster
of individual contestants and cliques actively involved in the
struggle for control over the party, the army, the government, the
civil service, and parastatal organizations. . . . Access to the state
thus becomes a source of potential rewards for some groups and
deprivations for others. (Emphasis added)
Of course, political settings are never quite this simple. Many of

the societies where political entrepreneurs are, or have been, at work
are already characterized by class and social differences that parallel
ethnic ones (Derlugian, 1998). The exacerbation of these differences,
through an appeal to chauvinistic ideologies of identity, becomes a
means for these elites to extract or negotiate for more economic re-
sources, status, and power within a “state of their own.” In this fash-
ion, political entrepreneurs are able to transform “ethnic” identities
into tools of political mobilization and opposition. The collapse of
Yugoslavia falls into this pattern,8 but it is apparent in any number of
122 Chapter 6
countries afflicted by ethnic conflict. Indeed, there is reason to think

that even democratic capitalist countries could fall victim to this pro-
cess (Lipschutz, 1998b).
There is nothing particularly new or novel about these argu-
ments, or about the impacts of international economic change on the
domestic politics of countries at different levels of development;
Alexander Gerschenkron (1962) wrote about this in the early 1960s
(see also Crawford, 1995). What is different now is that the processes
of economic liberalization and integration, thought so important to
national competitiveness and growth, have, on the one hand, under-
mined critical responsibilities of the state even as they have, on the
other hand, created a whole set of demands for “new” states or com-
parable political entities. In a very real sense, however, this explana-
tion of the sources of ethnic conflict does not account for the ways in
which opportunities for social and political mobilization come into
being; rather, it takes for granted that political communities can, and
do, implode. What creates the necessary, if not sufficient, conditions
for implosion is less clear.
Breaking Up Is Not So Hard to Do
The difficulty in explaining so-called ethnic and cultural violence may

arise because of (1) our inability to see any kind of political formation
other than the state; (2) a continuing ontological commitment to and
epistemological fascination with the state and state system; and (3) our
reluctance to see certain contradictions that inhere to both. Not only
are states considered to be the “highest” form of political organization
in existence today—at least, as scholars of international relations ar-
gue—they are also signifiers of legitimate power that, as Lemarchand
notes above, bring wealth and status to individuals simply by virtue of
the capacity to occupy dominant roles within them.
Two consequences follow. First, in the contemporary world, le-
gitimate representation can arise only through a state; no other form
of political status or autonomy quite fits the bill (see chapter 8). Sec-
ond, as indicated above, control of a state also provides access to a
considerable flow of wealth and power, via rents that can be extracted
from domestic constituencies and international sources of finance. Not
everyone takes advantage of political power for these “corrupt” ends—

we like to think that Western democracies are, in particular, immune
from such corruption9—but those who do do this in an overt fashion are
more likely to find themselves ruling a potentially unstable country.
There is a tendency among analysts and policymakers, moreover,
to take for granted the fundamental ontological reality of the state and
its ability to exercise meaningful control over what goes on within and
across its borders (Mearsheimer, 1994), although the growing reach of
the global economic system puts paid to this fantasy, even if not in the
way that is commonly believed (Strange, 1996). Interdependence theory
is, by now, almost a cliché, reaching a preposterous extreme in Kenichi
Ohmae’s (1991) “borderless” world of nearly 6 billion atomized con-
sumers. But realists continue to argue that states remain states and could,
if they wished, reassert their hegemony over transnational economic,
social, and cultural processes (Thomson, 1995). Interdependendistas,
conversely, speak sorrowfully of the “erosion” of sovereignty, as though
the material base of the state is carried away through slowly growing
ravines, while leaving the mountains largely intact.
Such theories cannot explain, however, how and why states might
fall apart into smaller units, inasmuch as they largely ignore two criti-
cal factors. First, as Buzan’s conceptualization indicates, the state is a
cognitive as well as a material construct, and it relies heavily on citi-
zen loyalty for legitimacy, authority, and continuity. Second, in the
absence of mechanisms for reinforcing loyalty, such as nationalism,
the introduction of markets can exacerbate rather than eliminate al-
ready existing social and cultural schisms even as it further under-
mines the basis of loyalty to the state (as indicated by the collapse of
the Soviet Union; Crawford, 1995). Conversely, as seen in the People’s
Republic of China, nationalism can become a powerful tool for main-
taining loyalty to the state when markets are eroding older bases of
state legitimacy (Wehrfritz, 1997).
To repeat: for historical reasons and as discussed above, societies
and states are usually organized along lines that tend to privilege some
groups over others. Such privileges often have much to do with the
national, ethnic, or even regional constitution of state and society. Many
states have struggled to mute or eliminate such hierarchies, with varying
degrees of success and failure, through juridical relief, internal resource
transfers, and administrative fiat. Under appropriate conditions, markets
124 Chapter 6
can be efficient allocators of investment. They are, however, largely

indifferent to national and ethnic distributions of power and wealth,
except insofar as they delineate specific niches for production, ser-
vices, and sales (Reiff, 1991; Elliott, 1997). And because markets do
require rule structures to operate, those who can establish the rules
are often able to do so to their individual or collective advantage.
Moreover, as markets and economies are liberalized and opened to
greater competition from abroad, conditions also favor those who
have begun the new game with greater factor endowments. As any
investor knows, you have to have money to make money. Left to its
own devices, therefore, the market provides greater and more remu-
nerative opportunities to those who are already well-off, and leaves
farther behind those who are less wealthy and begin with fewer
initial advantages.
Beyond this, as noted in earlier chapters, integration and frag-
mentation are linked consequences of the further globalization of capi-
talism, rather than independent phenomena as is sometimes assumed.
The origins of global economic integration are to be found in the mid-
nineteenth century, with the rise of English liberalism and the doctrine
of free trade as propogated by the Manchester School (some argue that
it began even earlier, in the sixteenth century). With fits, starts, and
retreats, such integration has reached into more and more places in the
world, creating myriad webs of material and cognitive linkages. The
fact that such integration has become so widespread does not mean
that all places in the world share in the resulting benefits (nor does it
necessarily imply a fading away of the state).
Indeed, it is uneven development, and the resulting disparities
in growth and wealth, that make capitalism so dynamic. And, as I
noted in chapter 2, it is the constant search for new combinations
of factors of production and organization, and not states, that drives
innovation, competition, and the rise and fall of regions and lo-
cales.10 The fact that there are multiple economic “systems” present
in any one location simply adds to the dynamism of the process.11
Today’s comparative advantage may become tomorrow’s competi-
tive drag.
The larger political implications of this process have not been
given much thought. Comparative advantage is no longer a feature of
states as a whole—it never really has been, in any event—but, rather,
of region and locale, where the combination of material, technological

and intellectual, is, perhaps, only briefly fortuitous (Noponen, Gra-
ham, and Markusen, 1993; Smith, 1989). The specific advantages of
a place such as Silicon Valley—in many ways, a historical accident
arising as much from the war in the Pacific as the result of deliberate
policy12—may have only limited spillover in terms of a country as a
whole. The specific conditions that give rise to such development poles,
moreover, seem not to be so easily reproduced wherever there is land
available for a “science park.”13
Holders of capital can choose locations in which to invest. Cities,
communities, places—and to a certain degree, labor—control a much
more limited set of factors through which they can attract capital.
Because the supply of capital is seen as limited (and probably is),
competition among places to attract investment and jobs becomes more
of a zero-sum game than the positive sum one argued by advocates of
comparative advantage. For a country as a whole, where wealth is
produced is thought to be immaterial; for towns and cities, it can be
a matter of life or death. This point is not lost, for example, on those
American states and cities that have established foreign trade offices
and regularly send trade missions abroad (Shuman, 1992, 1994). Nor
have the business opportunities arising from such competition been
ignored; according to one article in the San Francisco Examiner (Trager,
1995) describing the activities of a consulting firm providing city and
regional marketing programs for economic development, its activities
resemble those
of an international arms dealer—selling weapons to one ruler and
then making a pitch to the neighboring potentate based on the
new threat. Part of the pitch for these [economic development]
programs is that a region needs its own program to survive against
the rival programs of other areas.
This could become the cause of considerable political antagonism

against the neighbors who win and the authorities who are deemed
responsible for the loss.
As discussed above, how these particular dynamics play them-
selves out depends on the history and political economy of the specific
state and society under consideration and preexisting social and politi-
cal “differences” that, under the pressures of real, potential, or imag-
126 Chapter 6
ined competition, become triggers of antagonism. The critical point is

that the disjunctures between past and future, and between places and
regions within countries, can have politically destructive consequences
for the state, because it can also delegitimate the cognitive and ideo-
logical basis for loyalty to state and society. As pointed out in chapter
2, the notion that individual self-interest can serve the social welfare
is only valid under rather narrow conditions. Much of the time (and to
a growing degree), the newly wealthy see no reason to contribute to
state and society. The newly–poor and those with declining prospects
see that the state cares less and less about them. Both groups become
alienated from state and society, although the former retreat into pri-
vate enclaves while the latter seek to restore the status quo ante. Both
moves contribute to the fragmentation and dissolution of the public
political sphere. The result is that, with the global economic integra-
tion that reaches into more and more corners of the world, we find
ourselves faced with dialectically linked integration and fragmentation
that can play itself out in a number of different ways (see, e.g.,
Sakamoto, 1994).
In the United States, for a number of historical reasons, potential
divisions are geographical as well as class- and ethnicity-based. While
it is difficult to envision the secession of individual states, not a few
parts of the country have been abandoned by the rest as a result of
integration and competition (Lipschutz, 1998b). In other countries,
such as the former Yugoslavia, the boundaries between jurisdictions
were intended to be administrative, but were drawn up in ethnic or
national terms. In yet other places, the dividing lines are linguistic,
religious, clan-based, “tribal,” or even vaguely cultural (Derlugian,
1998). It goes without saying that those places in which people have
fallen to killing each other have nothing to offer global capital—they
have, quite literally, fallen out of “history”—but those places able to
break away from the political grip of larger polities, as Slovenia es-
caped the competitive drag of Serbia, might be well-placed to partici-
pate in the global economy. Conversely, as seen in the tentative moves
of Catalonia to assert its place among the “regions” of Europe, and the
interminable discussions in Quebec about whether it would be better
off alone than in the Canadian federation, the number of potential
states or statelike entities appears to be quite large.
How Many Are Enough?
How many of the potential nations existing in the world are likely to
seek a state? Approximately 50 countries signed the United Nations
charter in 1945. In theory, those 50 represented virtually all of the
population of the Allied countries and empires, inasmuch as the Eu-
ropean powers fully expected to regain control over colonial territories
occupied by the Axis or lost, for a time, to domestic insurgencies. By
the mid-1970s, with the first wave of postwar decolonization just about
over, UN membership had climbed to more than 150. Following the
collapse of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the number of states
belonging to the UN passed 190. There is little reason to think the
count will stop there, as suggested by an article in the Wall Street
Journal (Davis, 1994) entitled “Global Paradox: Growth of Trade Binds
Nations, but It Also Can Spur Separatism.” The author pondered whether
we might see a world of 500 countries at some time in the future.
Another piece in the San Francisco Chronicle (Viviano, 1995), “World’s
Wannabee Nations Sound Off,” told of the many ethnic, indigenous,
and sectarian groups seeking political autonomy. Finally, there are
World Wide Web sites listing hundreds of “microstates” and “micro-
nations,” some serious, others not.
In principle, there are few limits to the number of independent
states that might come into being in the future; some have suggested
the world’s 2,000-odd languages or 5,000-odd potential ethnies stand
as an upper limit. In practice, however, there is considerable reluctance
on the part of already existing countries to recognize new ones that
have not been created with the consent of both government and gov-
erned, even though this specific requirement is quite elastic (see
Bierstecker and Weber, 1996). As testified to by efforts to reassemble
shattered states, such as Cambodia and Somalia, there may also be a
sub-rosa fear that successful nonstate forms of political community
could be disruptive of the current structure of international politics. In
other words, for the time being, the only normatively acceptable form
of political community at the international level is the state. A prolif-
eration of clans, tribes, city-states, trading leagues, social movement
organizations, transnational identity coalitions, diasporas, and so on
could raise questions of legitimacy and representation that might very
128 Chapter 6
well undermine the status of existing states, not to mention well-estab-

lished hierarchies of power and wealth (see chapter 8).
But there are also limits beyond which the “international commu-
nity” will apparently not go to in order to preserve existing international
borders. The Bosnia “peace settlement” signed at Dayton, Ohio, in late
1995 suggests one such limit. With all of its inherent flaws and contra-
dictions, the agreement seemed to recognize that, in this case at least,
juridical borders would make not the slightest difference to ethnic poli-
tics after fragmentation. The agreement maintained the fiction of a uni-
tary Bosnia, albeit as a confederation of federations comprised of what
are by now largely ethnically pure, semiautonomous territories. Provi-
sions permitting repatriation to their former homes of refugees of ethnicity
different than the dominant one have, for the most part, gone unfulfilled,
although municipal elections have taken place, with displaced refugees
being allowed to vote in their former towns of residence.
The reality appears to be, however, that the Bosnian Croats treat
mostly with Zagreb, and the Bosnian Serbs mostly with Belgrade.
There is not much in the way of border controls between the respec-
tive ethnic zones and the mother countries, whereas there might well
develop increasingly stronger controls between the ethnic zones within
Bosnia. And the Bosniak (Muslim) government in Sarajevo will do
what it can to maintain itself and expand. If a relative degree of peace
can be established and maintained within the fiction of a state—as
seems to be happening—the United States and Europe will be satisfied.
A precedent will have been established that can be cited by others
seeking a similar settlement (Campbell, 1997).
From the perspective of the industrialized powers, and especially
the United States, there are also both military and economic reasons
to limit the number of independent states occupying the planet’s sur-
face. While the United States once pursued a policy of “divide and
conquer” in its efforts to dismember the European colonial powers, it
has never had a real national interest in a proliferation of juridically
sovereign states. For one thing, managing a highly fragmented world
system is quite complicated and expensive—as evidenced in reduc-
tions in the number of U.S. embassies and consulates abroad. For
another, the transaction costs of dealing with even a single new na-
tional government can be considerable, especially if it is located in a
politically sensitive region.
Too many states also pose a strategic nightmare (a point made

implicitly by Chase, Hill and Kennedy, 1996). During the Cold War,
each new country had the potential of becoming another cockpit of
East-West conflict and, therefore, each existing state required minute
attention (and control) lest the Soviets gain another salient into the
West. This militated against changes in borders. Now, each additional
state is one that could fall under the control of “rogues” or putative
terrorists or into threatening disorder. The reported presence of Iranian
and Afghani mujuhadeen on Bosniak territory during the civil war
there gave nightmares to NATO commanders, the National Security
Council, and the U.S. Congress (whether such fears were justified or
not). But practically speaking, there is little to prevent the establish-
ment of new states except the ability of more powerful countries to
stop the process through active intervention and economic boycotts,
something few of them have so far indicated a willingness to do, the
intervention by NATO on behalf of Kosovo not withstanding.
But maybe more is better. From the economic and cultural per-
spectives, there is no reason not to have a world of 500 or more
statelike political entities. In the past, big was preferable. Because the
military prowess of a Great Power rested on its material and economic
base, and the autonomy of that base required relatively high levels of
self-reliance, large territories could provide both economies of scale
and security. Neomercantilism made sense. This was the logic behind
states with continental or even transcontinental scope, such as the
United States, the Soviet Union, and European colonial empires.
Nowadays, however, within the structure of the new global division of
labor, and the apparent prospects for global (if not local) peace, pros-
perity rests more than ever on comparative advantage and market niches
(a point also argued in Rosecrance, 1996).
The difficulties involved in getting the single European currency
up and running—in part, exacerbated by the differential levels of wealth
and development from northern to southern and western to eastern
Europe—also suggest that such economies of scale may no longer
matter as much as they once did. Fordist production for mass mar-
kets—both raw materials as well as consumer goods—leads to over-
capacity, ruinous competition, and, perhaps, national bankruptcy; niche
strategies allow regions and locales in industrialized countries to trade
in similar, although not identical, goods and services, without having
130 Chapter 6
to broadly share the wealth with less-fortunate compatriots in other

parts of their country. The result can only be detrimental to the politi-
cal cohesiveness of existing nation-states.
Every House a State?
In one sense, the state has come full circle in its travels from Westphalia
to “McWorld” (as Benjamin Barber puts it; 1995). When the original
documents constituting state sovereignty were formulated and signed
in the seventeenth century, the princes and their noble colleagues were
seeking to protect themselves. States (and populations) were sovereign
property, not the autonomous actors we imagine them to be today and,
inasmuch as royal sovereignty was coterminous with territory, prince
and state were the same. In essence, the Westphalian agreement said,
“What is mine is mine, what is yours is yours, and we leave each
other’s property alone.” Exclusion of the Other was, therefore, the
watchword, for this was the best way to ensure that one’s property
would be left alone. This did not rule out wars, of course, for there was
nothing and no one to enforce such agreements. As often as not, self-
interest and family feuds overrode social niceties (Elias, 1994).
The transition from royal state to nation-state was a gradual one,
though well under way by the end of the eighteenth century. Still, the
fundamental principle of state exclusivity did not change. Indeed,
without it, the state as an entity with sole jurisdiction over a defined
territory could not exist, precisely as it did not exist in this form prior
to the Westphalian revolution. In its absence, we would be faced now,
as then, with a form of “neomedievalism,” characterized by overlap-
ping but differentiated political realms, governed by multilevel and
sometimes coterminous authorities, with inhabitants confessing loy-
alty to several different units, depending on circumstances (see, e.g.,
Elias, 1994; Bull, 1977:264–76).
As events turned out, the nation-state came to be defined by a
shared, if artificial or imagined, nationality that was also exclusive: the
citizen could not confess loyalty to more than one state at a time (even
today, dual citizenship is rarely permitted by national authorities). The
nation-state thus became, on the one hand, a container for all those
who fit within a certain designated category and, on the other hand, a
barrier to keep out those who did not fit within that category. It also
became a means for the accumulation of power at the center as well
as the division of power with other similar centers.
To reinforce the claim to centralized power and generate exclu-
sive allegiance to a single center, the state had to accomplish two ends.
First, it had to eliminate competing claimants to legitimacy from within
its putative jurisdiction; ethnic cleansing was state practice long before
CNN began to transmit news stories and film from Bosnia and Rwanda.
Turning “peasants into Frenchmen” (Weber, 1976)—or whatever—
could lead either to assimilation of peripheral nations into the nation-
ality of the center, or it could result in the ruthless extermination of
minorities by the center (Elias, 1994). Second, the state had to gener-
ate in those under its jurisdiction a parallel resistance to the attractions
of other centers, that is, other nation-states and nationalities. Keeping
with the precise demarcation of state territories beginning in the nine-
teenth century, it also became necessary to demarcate precisely the
same boundaries within the minds of those living within the lines on
the ground and to discipline those who, somehow, violated those bound-
aries (a point to which I return in the next chapter).
Nationalism—and distinctions among types is irrelevant here—
was, with very few exceptions, formulated as a doctrine of collective
superiority and absolute morality vis-à-vis other nations, thereby serv-
ing to bind citizens to the state and to separate them from other states.
This was not a one-way deal, of course; the state promised to provide
security and political stability to those who signed up with it and not
with another (not unlike the deals offered by competing phone and
Internet Service Providers companies today). This system of national
exclusivity reached its apogee during the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury, when some countries became, in effect, sealed containers from
which there was no possibility of escape. The end of the Cold War not
only unsealed the containers but provided the permissive conditions
for new containers to be established, as groups of people found them-
selves both dispossessed from their position within the nation-state
and increasingly resentful of their dispossession.
Where might the processes of state fragmentation and social
contraction stop, once they have been put into motion? Here, the con-
tradictions between the nation-state and the market become critical. To
repeat briefly what has been said above as well as many times before:
132 Chapter 6
the liberal doctrine of self-interest calls into question the relationship

between the self-interested actor and the larger context within which
that actor finds him/her/itself, be it society and state or individual and
society. At the international level, this tension is resolved through the
dual fictions of anarchy and self-help; at the domestic level, however,
taking the logic of self-interest to an extreme risks civil or social
warfare and the replication of a Hobbesian “state of nature” at the
neighborhood, household, or even individual level. All that is lacking,
it would seem, are entrepreneurs with the military force to challenge
the center. Given the chaos in some places around the world, and the
growing obsession with “gang violence” in the United States and
Europe, some might argue that this situation already holds in more
places than we would care to acknowledge (Enzenberger, 1994).15
7❖
THE PRINC(IPAL)
On March 3, 1983, President Ronald Reagan appeared on American

television to announce the end of the nuclear threat. A new military
program, designed to protect the country against the possibility of a
first-strike attack by Soviet nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic mis-
siles, was about to be launched. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),
or “Star Wars” as it was almost immediately tagged by its detractors,
was proffered to an increasingly restive public as a means of overcom-
ing the moral dilemma inherent in mutual assured destruction (MAD):
the holding hostage of one’s people to potential nuclear annihilation as
a means of preventing the enemy from even contemplating such an
attack. This particular dilemma had already created political disorder
throughout Europe and America, manifested most clearly in the Nuclear
Freeze movement, the Catholic Bishops’ statement on nuclear weap-
ons, and massive antinuclear protests throughout Western Europe
(Meyer, 1990; Wirls, 1992). Reagan, seizing on citizens’ fears of nuclear
war, offered SDI as an alternative means of protecting them, thereby
attempting to render ineffective and impotent the arguments of
“freezniks,” bishops, and other antinuclear activists.
There were numerous critics of SDI. Most chose not to contest
the program on moral grounds but, rather to launch an attack on its
133
134 Chapter 7
technological (in)feasibility (see, e.g., Drell, Farley, and Holloway,

1985). This, they hoped, would blast to bits what some saw as a
dangerous and destabilizing attempt to gain a viable first-strike capa-
bility against the Soviet Union, a capability that might trigger the very
eventuality that everyone wished to avoid. But here SDI’s critics faced
an insoluble dilemma: inasmuch as one could never prove conclu-
sively that an effective shield could not be built, how could one justify
halting a project that promised such an enticing vision?1 Ultimately,
the defense sectors of the United States and its allies managed to
absorb tens of billions of dollars in a largely fruitless attempt to de-
velop the required technologies, although this has not deterred various
parties from continuing to argue that a strategic defense system is
feasible, desirable, and necessary or the Clinton Administration and
U.S. Congress deciding to proceed with an SDI Junior (Rowny, 1997;
see also Mandelbaum, 1996).
What was largely ignored in the long-playing, choleric exchange
over SDI was its essentially moral purpose. SDI became a tool of the
American state in providing an impenetrable shield not so much against
missiles and accidental nuclear launches (whether from friend or foe)
as in opposition to notions of detente, disarmament, and other indica-
tors of declining determination and credibility vis-à-vis the USSR. In
offering SDI, Ronald Reagan was promising to build a barrier that
would redraw the wavering lines between the Free World and its un-
free doppelgänger, between democracy and totalitarianism, between
the “Evil Empire” and the “City on the Hill.” Indeed, SDI was a moral
statement but, more than that, it was also a reimagining and reinforc-
ing of the borders between nations, between liberal and socialist na-
tionalisms, between what was to be permitted and what was absolutely
forbidden.
In this chapter, I explore these matters. I begin by describing the
features of the moral-state, as I call it, and review briefly the anteced-
ents to this phenomenon, beginning prior to 1648 with a specific focus
on the ways in which states, as constituted following the Thirty Years
War, also functioned as moral authorities. In historical terms, this
authoritative role was first expressed through the person of the sover-
eign. Following the collapse of the universal moral authority of the
Roman Catholic Church, the sovereign’s mandate to rule the state
invoked God’s authorization. Although most contemporary democra-
The Princ(ipal) 135
cies do not seek legitimacy through theocracy, these deeply buried

roots nevertheless retain considerable influence.
This is seen, in particular, in the emergence of nationalism—the
“civil religion” of the state—as a new source of moral authority, a
topic I address in the second section of the chapter. The emergence of
state-centered nationalisms was a product of the secular Enlighten-
ment—many of whose acolytes nevertheless subscribed to the author-
ity of “Nature” and natural law (see Noble, 1997). The state now came
to provide bounded containers of moral authority within which some
practices were prescribed in the name of national solidarity while
others were proscribed on pain of ostracism or expulsion. At the limit,
as discussed in chapter 6, some national elites found it expedient to
eliminate whole classes and categories of people within their states’
borders, or to engage in large-scale civil warfare in order to establish
domestic moral discipline.
In the third section of the chapter, I examine the emerging con-
tradiction between the moralities of nationalism and the rise of liberal
individualism, especially as it developed after 1945. As I argued in
earlier chapters, containment of the “Free World” and the “Soviet
bloc” throughout the Cold War specified the perimeters of two domi-
nant orders and thereby united two great polities, each within its own
“sphere of moral influence.” Populations were disciplined not so much
by the threat of physical punishment—although this was forthcoming
in certain situations—as the fear of being cast outside the “Realm of
Order” into moral ambiguity (and damnation?). President Reagan’s
invocation of the “Evil Empire” was thus as much an allusion to Satan
and his legions as Stalin and his. More recently, the United States has
attempted to reimpose its global moral authority by way of what I
called, in an earlier chapter, “disciplinary deterrence,” both at home
and abroad, via public relations, demonstration, and, if necessary, public
punishment.
Finally, I address the collapse of state-centered moral authority in
the New World Order of global liberalization. As I argued in chapter 2,
old (b)orders have dissolved under the pressures of the global market,
which, in turn, has become a sink for, rather than a source of, moral
authority. The ever-more-frantic search for new sources of moral author-
ity therefore proceeds through a great number of channels—social,
political, economic, ethnic, identity-based—but none is likely to provide
136 Chapter 7
the means for reestablishing borders and order. I conclude with a

discussion of efforts to restore (b)orders, and speculate on the impli-
cations of such an impossible task for twenty-first century global
politics.
Real-State or Moral-State?
The end of the Soviet Union destroyed utterly and finally the concep-
tual border between the good of the Free World and the evil of the
“bad bloc,” thereby exposing the American people to all sorts of per-
nicious, malevolent, and immoral forces, beliefs, and tendencies. It
should be no cause for wonder, consequently, that the domestic poli-
tics of morality, especially in the United States, have become so pro-
nounced and full of inconsistencies (“get the government off of our
backs but into the bedrooms of teenage mothers”) and have been
extended ever more strongly into the international arena.2 Paradoxi-
cally, perhaps, the fundamental causal explanations for these contra-
dictions are to be found not in domestic politics, as is conventionally
thought; rather, the roots of this phenomenon lie in the very nature of
the nation-state itself, in its somewhat uncertain place in the so-called
international system, and in the spread of the norms and practices of
political and economic liberalism, a point I have argued in earlier
chapters. Far from being amoral, as is so often claimed, state behavior,
as encoded in the language and practices of realism, nationalism, state-
centricity, and anarchy, exemplifies morality in the extreme, with each
unit representing a self-contained, exclusionary moral-state.
How can this be? In contemporary international relations theory,
the conventional perspective on the nation-state is largely a realist,
functionalist one. The state serves to protect itself and its citizens
against external enemies, and to defend the sanctity of contracts and
property rights from internal ones. Morality, as George Kennan (1985/
86) and others have never tired of telling us, should play no role in the
life of the real-state, for to do so is to risk both safety and credibility.
But can the state stand simply for the protection of material interests
and nothing else (Hirsch, 1995; Ellis and Kumar, 1983)? After all, the
essential constitutive element of the nation-state—the nation—repre-
sents the eternal continuity of specific myths, beliefs, and values, usu-
The Princ(ipal) 137
ally with a teleological character. Conversely, the defeat of those ele-

ments, whether in war or peace, represents a mortal wound to the
nation as well as to the authority and legitimacy of the state that
protects it.
This aspect of the state is largely ignored by the conventional
wisdoms of both realism and liberalism (not to mention Marxism).
Their advocates fail to historicize the state, seeing it as having no
genealogy and thereby omitting from their stories of international
politics one critical element: the European state, as heir to the author-
ity of the Catholic Church, was originally constituted as a moral order,
defining a prescriptive standard of legitimate authority through con-
tainment of its citizens within well-defined physical and moral (b)orders.
And, with some changes, this remains the practice today. The legiti-
macy of the state does not grow simply out of material power; it also
rests on the presumption that the state’s authority is both good and
right (Brown, 1992: chaps. 2-3). And, although legitimacy is normally
addressed only within the context of domestic politics (if then), history
from the Thirty Years War on nonetheless illustrates that domestic
legitimacy matters in international politics, too.
One might argue, of course, that that was then and this is now.
The contemporary state no longer fulfills this moral role, and has not
done so for many decades. Contemporary threats to state and polity
are almost wholly material: terrorists throw bombs, illegal immigrants
take resources, diseases trigger illness. I argue to the contrary: the
modern nation-state acts not only to protect its inhabitants from threat-
ening material forces, it also acts to limit their exposure to noxious
ideas by establishing boundaries that discipline domestic behavior and
beliefs. After all, what is a “terrorist” but someone with bad ideas?
What is an “illegal” immigrant except someone who knowingly vio-
lates public norms? A state that cannot maintain such (b)orders be-
comes a prime candidate for disorder. And, as I shall argue below, it
is in no small part the collapse of these moral borders that is respon-
sible for much of the political disorder throughout the world today.3
More specifically, the kulturkampf that has wracked the United
States (and other countries) since the end of the Cold War, and prob-
ably longer, is a struggle over where, and on whom, these moral bor-
ders should be inscribed. It is not a simple matter, however, of the
moral versus the immoral (or amoral) within the confines of the 15
138 Chapter 7
members of the European Union, the 50 American states or the world’s

190-odd countries. Rather, the question is more properly understood
as: Are the borders of our contemporary moral community to be na-
tional or global? If pernicious forces have free reign across formerly
impermeable borders, how can the struggle stop at the water’s edge?
And, if such miscreants threaten to penetrate the body politic with
their black helicopters, Gurkha troops, and Soviet tanks, how can we
not carry the culture war into the international realm (as Samuel
Huntington and others have done)?
Consequently, on the one side of this struggle are those who
would reinscribe the national, excluding or expelling all who do not
live up to the moral standards of the Founding Fathers of the United
States (there are no Founding Mothers), and extending the borders of
that morality abroad through example and discipline (U.S. congres-
sional prohibitions on family-planning funds to certain countries and
the Helms-Burton Act restricting dealings with Cuba come to mind
here). On the other side are those who, for better or worse, by virtue
of choice or via the chances of change, find themselves swept up or
away by the disintegration of national and moral (b)orders. This latter
group is not identical with those captive to the contemporary events
that give rise to refugees, migrants, and the casualties of wars and
markets; its members freely make choices among and in support of
difference in ways that the culture warriors resolutely abjure. And, as
I noted above and in chapter 4, these struggles are not restricted to the
domestic domain; in the global realm, moral conflict, disguised as
“cultural” or religious difference, has come to replace the ideological
blocs of the Cold War. In these struggles, the United States has taken
on the role, not of world policeperson, as it is often said, but global
dominatrix (both mistress and vice-princ(ipal)). But how can this be?
What Was Westphalia?
For most international relations (IR) scholars, and for mainstream IR

theory, the defining moment of contemporary world politics was 1648,
when the Treaty of Westphalia brought an end to the Thirty Years War.
As David Campbell critically observes, accounts of this history “offer
nothing less than an edifying tale of modernization in which we wit-
The Princ(ipal) 139
ness the overcoming of chaos and the establishment of order through

the rise of sovereign states” (Campbell, 1992:47). There is good rea-
son to believe that the signers of Westphalia, and its precedessor, the
Treaty of Augsburg, had nothing of this sort in mind at the time. It is
only through the contingent and contextual lenses of subsequent cen-
turies that such an orderly meaning was imposed on those events.
Today, this teleological story of the state offers two central
signifiers: anarchy and sovereignty. Through anarchy, we are told, the
princes who put their names to the two treaties agreed that a universal
authority—the Roman Catholic Church—would no longer stand over
them. Through sovereignty, each prince would come to constitute the
highest authority within each state and, enjoined from interfering in
the affairs of any other, would have no authority anywhere outside of
his state. This state of affairs, with its distinction between domestic
“order” and the interstate “nonorder,” was subsequently reified through
realist Hobbesianism, that is, hard interpretations of the writings of
Thomas Hobbes and others (Walker, 1992).
The princes were probably not very concerned about this particu-
lar inside/outside distinction; we might say that, in 1648, there was
more concern with affairs of family than matters of state. Indeed, if we
look at a map of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, we dis-
cover that relations between polities were much more intrafamilial
than international. Moreover, relations within domestic orders—often
scattered about the continent in discrete tracts—had as much to do
with which branch and member of a family ruled over a specific ter-
ritory as with each branch and individual’s religion (a point best illus-
trated by the intrafamily wars among British royalty and nobility; see
Elias, 1994).
Hence, while Westphalia did not put an end to these intrafamily
squabbles, it did for the most part do away with the remaining vestiges
of feudal authority, replacing a confused medieval order with a clear
hierarchy that placed prince or king above duke and lord, and invoked
the moral authority of God, whether Protestant or Catholic, to bless
and legitimate the new arrangements.4 Westphalia, in other words, was
a social contract for European society with an embedded morality
defining “good” behavior. It lacked many of the elements of domestic
orders, to be sure, including a sovereign, but it did provide moral
principles in place of an actual ruler. Those principles were frequently
140 Chapter 7
violated (although probably more often observed than not), but they
did form the basis for a continent-wide society.
Not altogether unintentionally, most late-twentieth-century main-
stream IR theorists have been little concerned with the domestic im-
plications of anarchy and sovereignty and have, instead, addressed the
functional significance of the two practices for relations among states.
Anarchy is said to imply “self-help,” or self-protection, while sover-
eignty is said to imply “self-interest” or, in its modern mode, accumu-
lation (Inayatullah, 1996). I will not belabor these two points, inasmuch
as they are the staple of every IR text published over the past 150
years (Schmidt, 1998). I will point out, however, that as practices, both
presuppose modes of transnational regulation rather than the absence
of rules and norms so often associated with them.5 More than this,
both sovereignty and anarchy can be regarded as expressions of a
state-centric morality that presumes a legitimate order within and il-
legitimate disorder without.
The first point is best seen in Kenneth Waltz’s well-known (albeit
flawed) invocation of the market as a structurally anarchic parallel to
international politics (Waltz, 1979). In invoking the headless market,
Waltz draws on Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand” to explain
outcomes of relations between states but fails to recognize that the
“invisible foot” of international politics might well produce results
quite unlike the orderly outcome posited by Smith. The error commit-
ted by Waltz is to regard both markets and international politics as
self-regulating, driven by no more than self-interest or power (Smith,
by contrast, hoped that religious beliefs would constrain people’s ap-
petites; see Hirsch, 1995).
As social institutions, markets are subject to both implicit and
explicit regulations. The market is governed, first of all, by the com-
mand “Thou shalt not kill.” Other rules follow. Walter Russell Mead
(1995/96:14) makes a similar point about airports and air travel when
he argues that, “Cutthroat competition between airlines coexists with
common adherence to traffic and safety regulations without which
airport operations would not be possible.” So it is between states. The
two principles of anarchy and sovereignty are both constitutive of the
international system as it is conceived and regulative of it, and they
constitute moral boundaries for the state that preserve the fiction of
international (dis)order and domestic order (Brown, 1992: chap. 5).
The Princ(ipal) 141
On reflection, it also becomes clear that sovereignty and anarchy

have moral and, in consequence, legal implications for domestic poli-
tics, too. As Hobbes (1962:132) put it,
[T]he multitude so united in one person, is called a COMMON-
WEALTH, in Latin CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great
LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal
god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and
defense. (Emphasis added)
By establishing borders between states and permitting rulers to be

sovereign within them, princes were granted the right to establish
within their jursidictions autonomous systems of law with both func-
tional and moral content. These systems enjoined certain activities in
order to prevent consequences that would be disruptive of the order of
the state—that is, order as the way things should be, according to the
individual prince’s vision. Or, as Hobbes (1962:113) argued, “But when
a convenant is made, then to break it is unjust: and the definition of
INJUSTICE, is no other than the not performance of covenant.” Vio-
lation of the convenant is, therefore, not simply the breaking of the
law; it is repudiation of the underlying moral code of the society.
Hobbes argued that coercive power, entrusted to Leviathan, was
necessary to ensure “performance of covenant” and the safety and
security of each man who subscribed to that covenant. But even though
the seventeenth century was quite violent, overt coercion was still
relatively uncommon. Rather, it was the possibility of discipline and
ostracism by the state (and the other subscribers to the covenant) as a
result of a violation of order—not repeated day-to-day punishment—
that kept subjects from violating the prince’s laws or the convenant
(and continues to do so today).6 Most, if not all, of the legal systems
of the time acknowledged, moreover, the hegemony of Christianity—
later manifested in the “divine right of kings”—even if they disagreed
on which particular version of the religion was to be practiced.7 Hence,
although princes opposed a universal morality or empire that could
impose sanctions on them against their wills, they sought to foster
such an order within their own jurisdictions, based on their right to do
so under God.
The fact that war and interstate violence among princes did not
cease after Westphalia does not mean, however, that morality was
142 Chapter 7
absent from their relations or that combatants were motivated by merely

functional needs or appetites. The moral basis of a political entity—its
ontology—provides a justification for its existence as well as the impli-
cation that other entities are morally illegitimate if they reject the ontol-
ogy of the first. John Ruggie (1989: 28) argues that Westphalia defined
who had the “right to act as a power,” thereby including within its
purview the numerous small and weak German principalities and states.
The treaty acknowledged both a right of existence for these units and the
right of each prince to impose his morality on his subjects.
Westphalia did not, however, command that each prince recognize,
accept the rule, or adopt the morality of others. War could thus be
understood as both a moral and material event. To be conquered was
punishment for immoral domestic beliefs and practices; to conquer was
reward for moral domestic beliefs and practices.8 By agreement, there-
fore, although Westphalia commanded domestic morality and interna-
tional amorality (the latter a rule rather than a condition), this did not
prevent princes from trying to extend the boundaries of their domestic
morality to engulf the domains of other, “immoral” princes.
The original Westphalian system lasted only about 150 years, if
that long. Although the royal sovereign was invested with authority via
a mysterious God, Enlightenment efforts to introduce rationalism into
political rule succeeded all too well, especially in Western Europe.
Whereas some of the early empirical scientists, such as Newton, saw
their work as illuminating the workings of a universe created by God
(Noble, 1997), others took a more physicalist view. Gradually, reli-
gious morality was undermined by scientific experimentation and ex-
planation, and philosophers and theorists sought to justify political
order by reference to Nature (which some still equated with God,
albeit a distant one; a somewhat exaggerated view of this change can
be found in Saul, 1992). From this tendency there emerged what came
to be called “nationalism.”
From Corpus Christii to Corpus Politicum
The first true nation-states, it is usually agreed, were Britain and France.
In Britain, the modern “nation” emerged out of the Civil War of the
seventeenth century, as Parliament fought with the king over the right
The Princ(ipal) 143
of rule and the power of the purse. The Puritan Revolution represented
an effort to impose on the state a moral order that was both Christian
and a forerunner of capitalist individualism but that nonetheless had
no external sources or referents of authority apart from God. Hence,
the Puritans portrayed Rome and its adherents (including, putatively,
any Catholic English sovereigns) as mortal enemies of Cromwell’s
Commonwealth and England.
This effort to purify the body politic of religious heresy was
doomed to fail, however, so long as heretics could not be expelled
from the nation’s territory or eliminated through extermination (a fa-
miliar problem even today).9 The Restoration, which put Charles II on
the British throne, was as much a recognition of the intractability of
the moral exclusion of a portion of the body politic itself as a reaction
against the harshness of the Commonwealth and its attacks on certain
elites. The emergence of the British nation during the following cen-
tury—and the renewal of war with France during the 1700s—redrew
the moral boundaries of society at the edges of the state, and estab-
lished loyalty to king and country as a value above all others.
In France, the Revolution launched a process whereby the source
of state legitimacy was transferred from an increasingly discredited
(and eventually dead) sovereign to the “people.” The French nation did
not, however, attempt to establish a new moral order; that was left to
the various and successive leaderships in the two centuries that fol-
lowed. But the French Revolution did mark a major change in the
ontology of the moral order of the state. Whereas the princely state
derived authority from God, the new French state derived its authority
from a “natural” entity called the “nation.” Enlightenment rationalism
sought explanations for the workings of the universe in science; even
Hobbes looked to Nature to explain politics and provide a model for
the Commonwealth. What could be more logical than to look for the
origins of the nation in Nature? By the end of the nineteenth century,
even though the very concept was less than a century old, nations had
been transmorgrified into constructs whose origins were lost in the
dim mists of antiquity but whose continuity was attributed to the their
connections to specific territories and the “survival of the fittest” (Dalby,
1990; Agnew and Corbridge, 1995).
As I have noted in earlier chapters, this new age of moral impe-
rialism was rooted in Darwin’s ideas about natural selection, but ex-
144 Chapter 7
tended from individual organisms as members of species to states

(Darwin, himself, had no truck with these ideas). Members and leaders
of nations that fifty years earlier had not even been imagined (Ander-
son, 1991) now competed to see whose history was more ancient and
who had survived greater travails for longer periods of time. This
became a means of establishing greater legitimacy and authority (a
process that continues, even today, in places such as Kosovo, Rwanda,
and Israel/Palestine). A more antideluvian history, in turn, established
the moral right to occupy particular territorial spaces, and delegitimated
the rights of all others to remain in those spaces (Berend and Ránki,
1979:80–96).
Inherent, too, in such national organicism was a notion of “pu-
rity,” not only of origins but also of motives. Long-term survival could
not be attributed simply to luck; it had, as well, to be a matter of
maintaining one nation’s moral distinctiveness from those who were
not of the nation, and of accounting for survival with a teleological
national mythology. Maintenance of such distinction through culture
was not, however, enough; there also had to be dangers associated
with difference. These dangers, often as not imagined into being (rather
than being “real” in any objective sense), made concrete those borders
separating one state from another.10 Those living in borderlands were
forced to choose one side or the other. Anyone on the wrong side of
such a border were, quite often, forcibly made to migrate across them,
as with Native Americans during the nineteenth century, Greeks and
Turks after World War I, Germans after World War II, Hindus and
Muslims in 1947, Palestinians on the wrong side of the moving “Green
Line” between 1947 and 1949, and many others since. Once again, a
form of moral order was invoked and moral purity maintained.
The apotheosis of this politics of danger took place during World
War II in those areas of Europe that fell under Nazi rule. To the
national socialist regime, guardian of the moral and biological purity
of all Germans, whether within the Third Reich or not, races of a
lower order were threats to both (Pois, 1986). The Nazi moral hierar-
chy could live with Slavs restricted to their place (although it intended
eventually to eliminate them or force them to move further to the east).
It could not tolerate Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, all of whom
tended toward high mobility across social, geographical, and sexual
borders, and who treated with what the national socialists regarded as
The Princ(ipal) 145
“impure” ideas and practices (e.g., “Jewish science”). Inasmuch as

containment in ghettos and camps was insufficient to protect the Ger-
man nation from these impurities, extermination came to be seen as a
necessity. And, so, millions died.
Ethnic cleansing thus serves a double purpose. Whereas forced
transfer leaves alive aggrieved populations whose territorial claims
might, at some time in the future, gain international legitimacy and
recognition, genocide does not. Not only does it remove contenders
for title to property, it also eliminates all witnesses to the deadly ac-
tions of the “moral community”—and, at times, as in towns and cities
in the former Yugoslavia and other partitioned or cleansed territories,
all physical traces, too.11 Any who are left behind will testify to the
evil intentions of those Others who have so conveniently been elimi-
nated or erased from the scene.
Nothing Succeeds like Success
In the United States, attacks on “liberals,” right-wing violence against

the federal government and the “New World Order,” and conservative
and religious fervor for “family values” (Bennett, 1998) can be under-
stood as an attempt to reimpose a nationalistic moral frame on what
some think is becoming a socially anarchic society (Lipschutz, 1998b;
Rupert, 1997). The kulturkampf at home is paralleled by the transfor-
mation of state practice from military-based to discipline-based behav-
ior, especially where U.S. foreign policy is concerned (see chapter 4).
A closer look suggests that the two are of a piece, as in the conver-
gence of a draconian welfare policy with an increasingly vocal move-
ment against immigrants—whatever their legal status—and their
countries of origin.
Welfare is deemed to sap the moral vitality of the poor, to foster
promiscuity and illegitimacy and, more generally, to be a form of
immoral “theft” from righteous citizens. Although statistics suggest
that most welfare recipients are U.S. citizens, much political ire and
fire has been directed at immigrants, whose moral claim to be in the
United States is deemed to be weak or nonexistent (a sentiment held
by some against immigrants in other countries, too; see Crawford and
Lipschutz, 1998). The film Independence Day, in which a disciplinary
146 Chapter 7
environmental sensibility (RECYCLE) complements a plot warning of

“aliens stealing our resources,” nicely illustrates how domestic and
foreign policy have come together around the extension of morality
from the private (domestic) to the public (international) sphere (and
further into the solar system and even interstellar space).12
How can we explain such behaviors? While the demise of social
(and moral) discipline has been instrumental in the erosion of the
citizen-state relationship (Drainville, 1995; see also chapter 8), this is
a proximate rather than a primary cause. To explain the sources of
social disorder—in this instance, the decline of the state’s moral au-
thority—we must again look back to the immediate post–World War
II period and the establishment of the Bretton Woods regime, which
put in place the basis for the current social crisis. As I proposed in
earlier chapters, the fundamental contradiction in the American and
British goal of liberalizing the world economy was that the interests
of citizen and state would coincide so long as there existed a threat
against which only the state could protect the citizen. By extending the
American economic system abroad, throughout the “Free World,” but
pointedly drawing lines around the always threatening Soviet bloc,
this arrangement generated broad support among Western publics and
largely eliminated the security dilemma inside of the Free World’s
borders.13
At the end of World War II, of course, the Free World was not
yet “free,”14 inasmuch as the Soviets had not yet been definitively
tagged as the new enemy. Harry Truman’s felicitous doctrinal phrasing
concerning “free peoples everywhere” provided the label; the imperi-
alism of the dollar and the fear of Reds did the rest. As the ex cathedra
pronouncements of politicians, pundits, and pastors, and novels and
films such as The Manchurian Candidate and Invasion of the Body
Snatchers suggested, communism was a pathology of Nature, not an
ideology of men; it took you over, you did not take it on (Lipschutz,
1997b: chap. 3). Keeping the enemy out and contained meant, there-
fore, not only imposing secure boundaries around the world but also
imposing limits on one’s own self and behavior.
The domino theory was not only about the fall of states; any
rupture of containment could breach the individual self and expose it
to evil. As I noted in chapter 3, the success and survival of the Free
World depended on extending boundaries around a natural community
The Princ(ipal) 147
(Stone, 1988) that had not, heretofore, existed. But in order to main-
tain its sovereignty and autonomy, this natural community had to be
juxtaposed against another. Thus, on one side of the boundary of
containment was to be found a unit (the Free World) whose sover-
eignty depended upon keeping out the influences of a unit on the other
side (the bloc). The Free World could never have existed without the
corresponding “unfree world.”
Within the borders of the Free World, however, there remained a
problem: the protection of state sovereignty and autonomy—hereto-
fore regarded as the natural order of things—threatened to undermine
the integrity of the whole. This was especially difficult from the
American point of view, as illustrated in the famous confrontation
between so-called isolationists and internationalists.15 The solution to
the dilemma was a form of multilateral economic nationalism (Ruggie,
1983a; 1991, 1995). Inside the boundaries of the Free World, states
were granted the right to manage their national economies, but only so
long as they agreed to move toward and, eventually, adopt the tenets
of an internationalized liberalism. With respect to the area outside the
boundaries, however, the Free World would, to the extent possible,
remain neomercantilistic and self-contained, antagonistic to those who
refused to “come in from the cold” (Pollard, 1985; Lipschutz, 1989;
Crawford, 1993).
Already in the late 1950s, the morality of this arrangement, and
the security strategy based on nuclear “massive retaliation,” was being
challenged by so-called peace movements opposed to the threat-based
logic of East-West relations (Deudney, 1995). By the early 1980s, the
Free World’s social contract was becoming fragile as a result of
détente, a growing international emphasis on human rights, and the
economic troubles that had begun during the 1970s. The former two
threatened to undermine moral order within the Free World by turning
friends into enemies and vice versa; the latter—especially inflation—
threatened to undermine moral order within the United States. It re-
quired the renewal of a really cold Cold War during the 1980s to
reestablish the moral polarities of East and West, and to excuse the
vile behaviors of American allies in the name of meeting the greater
moral threats of Soviet adventurism and loss of faith in America.
Alas, to no avail! The subsequent collapse of Communism, and
the much-trumpeted triumph of liberalism and democracy, fully under-
148 Chapter 7
mined the moral authority of the West, inasmuch as there was no

longer a global “evil” against which to pose a global “good.” As earlier
chapters have shown, the efforts of some to reestablish a moral di-
vide—as, for example, Samuel Huntington (1993, 1996) with his clash-
ing civilizations—have not, so far, been conspicuously successful.
To restore its moral authority in times to come, the nation-state
must redraw the boundaries of good and evil, replacing disorder with
new (b)orders. The United States government is attempting to restore
order at home and abroad in two ways. First, the notion of “democ-
ratization and enlargement,” offered during the first Clinton adminis-
tration, represents an attempt to expand the boundaries of the “good
world” (see Clinton, 1997). Those who follow democracy and free
markets subscribe to a moral order that makes the world safe for
Goodness (which, in turn, supports the now-conventional wisdom that
democracies never go to war with each other; but see Mansfield and
Snyder, 1995). Second, as described in chapter 4, disciplinary deter-
rence is being directed against so-called rogue states, terrorists, and
others of the “bad bloc,” who are said to threaten the good world even
though they possess only a fraction of the authority, influence, and
destructive power of the latter.16 Ordinary deterrence is aimed against
any state with the capabilities to threaten or attack. Disciplinary deter-
rence is different. It is an act of national morality, not of national
interests.
Bondage, Domination, Discipline
To repeat the point made in chapter 4, disciplinary deterrence is war-

fare by other means: through demonstration, through publicity, through
the equivalent of corporal punishment. The difficulty with disciplinary
deterrence is that there is no there there, and it does not work very
well. It is largely conducted against imagined enemies, with imagined
capabilities and the worst of imagined intentions. Two men with ex-
plosives or cults with gas hardly pose a threat to the whole of the
physical body politic; it is their ability to undermine faith in state
authority that is so fearsome to those in power. And, as pointed out in
earlier chapters, where “rogues” and other such enemies might choose
to issue a challenge, or why they would do so, is not at all evident (see
The Princ(ipal) 149
also Lipschutz, 1999b). But that these enemies represent the worst of
all possible moral actors is hardly questioned by anyone.
Disciplinary deterrence is not, however, limited to renegades
outside of the United States; it has also been extended into the domes-
tic arena. For most of the Cold War, the threat of Communist subver-
sion, and the fear of being identified as a Pinko Comsymp in some
police agency’s files, were sufficient to keep U.S. citizens from stray-
ing too far from the Free World straight and narrow. Red baiting
continued long after the Red Scares of the 1950s—one can even find
it today, in the excoriation of so-called liberals (San Francisco
Chronicle, 1997) and Marxist academics (Lind, 1991)—although the
language of discipline and exclusion has become somewhat more
sophisticated with the passage of time. Still, since the collapse of the
Soviet Union it has been difficult for political and social elites to
discipline an unruly polity; that things can get out of hand without
strong guidance from above is the message of South Central (Los
Angeles), Oklahoma City, Waco, and Ruby Ridge.
Consequently, warnings routinely issued from on high that the
“world is a dangerous place” serve to replace the disciplining threat of
Communism (Kugler, 1995). Such warnings are, however, unduly vague.
We are told that weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, biological,
chemical—could turn up in a truck or suitcase (Myers, 1997). We are
informed that laptop cyberterrorists are skulking around the Internet.
We are instructed that some country’s missiles are bound, eventually,
to land in Alaska, Hawaii, or even Los Angeles. Therefore, we must
rely on and trust the authorities to prevent such eventualities, even
though the damage done by one or several such devices would never
approach the destructive potential that still rests in the arsenals of the
nuclear weapons states (Lipschutz, 1999b).
Unnamed terrorists—often implied to be Muslim—are discussed
and dissed, but some of the most deadly actors turn out to be the “boy
or girl next door” (Kifner, 1995). The Clinton administration further
sows paranoia, seeking funding to track such neighbors by
creat[ing] a special computer tracking system to flag, or “profile,”

passengers and identify those with suspicious travel patterns or
criminal histories. . . . The names addresses, telephone numbers,
travel histories and billing records of passengers would be run
150 Chapter 7
through a giant database that might lead to a search of the lug-

gage of those deemed suspicious. (Broeder, 1996)
In a move reminiscent of CONTEILPRO, the FBI establishes “counter

terrorism task forces” in a dozen major U.S. cities that, according to
a draft memorandum, are “dedicated full time to the investigation of
acts of domestic and international terrorism and the gathering of intel-
ligence and [sic] international terrorism” (Rosenfeld, 1997). The Jus-
tice Department disseminates funds for cities to prepare for biological
terror attacks. Domestic police departments acquire military-type guns
and armored vehicles and, as events in New York, Los Angeles, and
elsewhere suggest, take on the role of occupying army. And the fearful
mayor of New York City, convinced that he might be a target for
foreign malcontents, barricades City Hall so that no citizen can enter
without official permission. Clearly, disorder knows no borders.
Every Wo/man a State!
The state possessed by the siren song of its own moral efficacy is not
yet an artifact of history; as illustrated by international indignation
over Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo, the acts of purification required by
extreme nationalism are not so willingly accepted in today’s world as
they once might have been. Interventions—on those rare occasions
when they do take place—are still usually explained, however, by old
statist moralities—the “balance of power” or some such—rather than
humanistic ones. At the same time, moreover, a new phenomenon has
emerged to challenge the logic of realism: the morality of the market
has begun to displace the morality of the state. One might easily say,
of course, that the market has no morality. Driven by an ethic of self-
interest, the individual is motivated only to consume as much as pos-
sible, within the constraints of the combined limit of her debit and
credit cards. And yet, and yet. . . .
There is a quite explicit morality associated with discourses of
market liberalism and economic growth. According to Smithian prin-
ciples, the behavior of individuals in free exchange, when taken to-
gether, leads to the collective betterment of society without the
intervention of politics or power. The market is often offered as a
The Princ(ipal) 151
“natural” institution, whose organic expansion is not unlike that of the

Darwinian states of yore. Indeed, the contemporary mantra of eco-
nomic competitiveness fuses the Social Darwinism of geopolitics with
the Social Darwinisn of the market: as always, only the fittest will
survive. Those old welfare-state ideas of community are not only passé,
they are the sure path to failure (see, e.g., Cohen, 1997). Hence, the
unfettered market generates an unequivocal good that, logically, must
also be morally desirable. Conversely, the intervention of politics or
power obstructs this generation of good by being “inefficient,” and
such meddling must therefore be immoral. The paradox that follows is
that any equity brought about by politics comes to be regarded as bad
(and immoral), while the inequities consequent on marketization are
deemed regrettable but the natural consequence of human nature and
good for those who get the short end of the stick (Himmelfarb, 1995;
see also Szerszynski, 1996).
In his 1973 biography of Eisenhower’s first secretary of state,
John Foster Dulles, Townsend Hoopes (1973:286) wrote that Dulles
believed that “American economic and technical superiority rested in
large part on the moral superiority of the free enterprise system” (em-
phasis added). This was not an isolated belief, then or now. According
to the President’s Materials Policy Commission (1952:1)—the Paley
Commission—established by President Truman in 1952 to examine
the problem of raw materials supplies:
The United States, once criticized as the creator of a crassly

materialistic order of things, is today throwing its might into the
task of keeping alive the spirit of Man and helping beat back from
the frontiers of the free world everywhere the threats of force and
of a new Dark Age which rise from the Communist nations. In
defeating this barbarian violence moral values will count most,
but they must be supported by an ample materials base. Indeed,
the interdependence of moral and material values has never been
so completely demonstrated as today, when all the world has seen
the narrowness of its escape from the now dead Nazi tyranny and
has yet to know the breadth by which it will escape the live
Communist one—both materialistic threats aimed to destroy moral
and spiritual man. The use of materials to destroy or preserve is
the very choice over which the world struggle today rages. (Em-
phasis added)
152 Chapter 7
Such ideas, originating with the Calvinist notion of the elect, have
been repeated again and again in countless political jeremiads
(Bercovitch, 1978) and presidential speeches, of which Bill Clinton’s
1997 Inaugural Address is only one recent expression (and which his
successor will, undoubtedly, repeat on January 21, 2001).
There is a difference between Calvinism and consumerism, how-
ever. In times past, one’s material success was indicative of one’s
moral superiority; today, one’s material consumption is indicative of
one’s contribution to the moral uplifting of the world. Indeed, we
might say that, in the emerging global moral economy, consumption
becomes not only an individual good, but a collective moral and utili-
tarian “good,” too. Consumption fosters prosperity, prosperity improves
people’s well-being and contentment with the status quo, and the re-
sultant stability of social relations is a morally desirable outcome. As
President Clinton (1997) put it in “A National Security Strategy for a
New Century,”
As we enter the twenty-first century, we have an unprecedented

opportunity to make our nation safer and more prosperous. Our
military might is unparalleled; a dynamic global economy offers
increasing opportunities for American jobs and American invest-
ment; and the community of democratic nations is growing, en-
hancing the prospects for political stability. . . .
Or, modifying slightly the late Deng Xiaoping’s dictum, “It is glorious
to consume.”
The dissemination throughout the world of liberal market prin-
ciples, including liberalization, privatization, and structural adjustment,
thus begins to acquire the character of a teleological moral crusade
rather than the simple pursuit of national or self-interest. Public own-
ership and welfare spending are condemned as inefficient and wasteful
and proscribed by international financial bodies and investors. Venal
and bloated governments expend resources on projects that contribute
to corruption and indolence, and undermine individuals’ efforts to
improve their own position and status by dint of moral reasoning and
good works. The discipline of the market rewards those who hew to
its principles, whether state, corporation, or individual. And those who
cannot or will not do so must be left to suffer the consequences of
their economic apostasy.
The Princ(ipal) 153
It’s the Economy, Stupid!
Stephen Gill (1995) has written perceptively about the ways in which
the “global panopticon” of liberal markets act to impose their peculiar
morality on the both the credit-worthy and credit-risky. As I argued
above, as the nation-state and nationalism have lost the moral author-
ity they once commanded, such authority has shifted increasingly to
the market and its disciplines (Strange, 1996). And there is more re-
ligion to the market than meets the eye. Those who don’t adhere to the
standards of the credit-givers (and takers!)—whether individual or
state—are cast out of the blessed innermost circle of the global economy.
To be readmitted requires a strict regimen of self-discipline, denial,
and reestablishment of one’s good name.
But even those with triple-A credit ratings and platinum plastic
are not free of this moral regime. Inundated daily with bank offers of
new credit cards and below-market interest rates, the credit-worthy are
kept to the straight and narrow by fear of punishment should they
violate the code of the credit-rating agencies. The proper response to
such offers is, of course, “Get thee from me, Satan!” (although not
everyone can rise above such temptation; ballooning consumer debt
and growing numbers of bankruptcies in the United States indicate
that backsliding is on the increase). Nonetheless, we see here the true
genius of a globalized credit system. Whereas Church authority was
akin to statist regulation—the same rules for everybody, with damna-
tion bestowed through the collective judgement of the community—
market-based morality relies on self-regulation (and self-damnation).
Pie can be had now (none of that “by and by in the sky” stuff) and
temporal salvation is keyed to individual capacity to carry the maxi-
mum credit load that s/he can bear—different strokes for different
folks. As many of us know from experience, however, self-regulation
is a weak reed on which to base a social system. Moreover, the desire
to consume to the maximum of one’s individual credit limit does carry
with it a larger consequence: the domestic social anarchy that arises
from self-interest as the sole moral standard to which each individual
consumer hews.
Faced with this New World morality, can the nation-state recap-
ture its moral authority and reimpose the borders of order? In some
places, such as the former Yugoslavia, the agents of virulent ethno-
154 Chapter 7
nationalisms have tried, but only with limited success. More recently,
in places such as Israel and Guatemala, the lure of riches in the market
have come to outweigh the certainty of riches by forced appropriation
(Lipschutz, 1999a). In other places, such as the United States and
Europe, culture wars have become the chosen means to discipline
those who would deviate from “traditional” social norms, in a forced
effort to bring the heretics back in. But hedonism, cultural innovation,
and social reorganization are hallmarks of the market so loved by the
very conservatives who have launched these very domestic battles
(Gabriel, 1997; Elliott, 1997).
Short of reimposing a kind of quasi-theocratic autarchy on their
societies—which, in any case, would be vigorously opposed by the
cosmopolitan economic elites that benefit from globalization, and lead
to disruption and upheaval on a massive scale—the nation-state has
little to fall back on in facing this new world. National borders might
be guarded by armies, navies and police armed to the teeth, but the
borders of nationalist moralities, drawn in the minds of the “nation,”
have always been fluid and difficult to demarcate. And imagination
knows no boundaries. Carried to an extreme, the market will turn each
of us into a nation of one, every man and woman a state, a world of
10 billion atomized, consuming countries. Then, indeed, will we enter
into the “borderless world.”
8❖
POLITICS AMONG PEOPLE
One may also observe in one’s travel to distant countries the

feelings of recognition and affiliation that link every human
being to every other human being.
—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
The pictures I have painted throughout this book are none too attrac-
tive; they might be pleasing to the logical eye but cannot be very
appealing to the emotional one. Yet, such scenes of gloom, doom,
conflict, war (and “liberal” peace; Lipschutz, 1999a) do not encom-
pass the entire world. As Kenneth Boulding (1977) once pointed out,
at any particular moment, the number of people living peaceful lives
is much, much greater than the number who are not. Why, then, focus
on the bad to the exclusion of the good or promising? Why not try to
portray positive possibilities rather than a bleak futurescape?
We pay greater attention to social disorder, violent conflict, and
war precisely because they are so outside the norm of everyday expe-
rience, because they “sell” in the media, and because they make us
feel a need to do something. The result, however, is that we are left
with the belief that the world truly is “a dangerous place,” that we are
under constant threat, and that there is little that we, as individuals or
155
156 Chapter 8
members of our small groups and organizations, can do. To be sure,

there are matters of pressing importance that could, under certain cir-
cumstances, seriously undermine the viability of human civilization
but, except for nuclear war or an errant asteroid, none of them is likely
to erupt very suddenly or have an instantly terminal effect.
The critical question thus remains, as it was put at the beginning
of the twentieth century: What is to be done? But “done” about what?
And who is to decide? There are many problems, more than can pos-
sibly be addressed. It might seem odd, then, to assert that we do not
lack for solutions to most of these problems, that we do “know” what
to do. But, by and large, the solutions are primarily technical ones, in
the sense that they propose to grow, make, or provide more: more
food, more energy, more democracy, more capitalism, more peace
agreements, more carbon dioxide sequestered in the ocean so that we
can drive more cars.
When the time comes to apply these solutions, however, things
turn out not to be quite so simple (Stone, 1988). To put the matter
prosaically, it is often easier to make a horse drink than to change the
customary social behaviors of both groups and individuals (Scott, 1999).
Furthermore, when faced with a menu of possible choices about “what
to do,” not every individual or group will select that option most
desired by policymakers, economists, or psychologists. “Rational
choice” does not mean singular possibilities, and even “irrational”
choices usually have a purpose behind them.
Later in this chapter, I offer a somewhat reflective perspective on
the future of citizenship, political action, and civil society in a global-
izing world, in the view that authority is possible only when people
are members of a social institution whose goals they actively support
(Drainville, 1996; Thomas, 1997). I also provide some thoughts about
what “belonging” and “membership” might mean under these various
arrangements. I argue there that, although the concept of global civil
society has been underdefined, for a variety of reasons it remains a
useful concept in terms of the matter of “after authority.” Drawing on
the work of Michael Mann (1993), Steven Gill (1993, 1995), Sakamoto
(1994), and others, I attempt to offer a more concrete conceptualization,
illustrating parallels between the emergence of the modern national
state, citizenship, and domestic civil society, and a growing system of
global governance and global civil society.
Politics among People 157
Making the claim that global civil society is important to the

future of global politics does not imply some sort of teleological “tri-
umph” of reason or a world state, if only because not all of the
transnational networks, coalitions, and actors making up global civil
society are supportive of this postnational project. Some act through
these networks in order to resist the state, while others engage in
attacks on states as collaborators with institutions of global gover-
nance such as the United Nations. Moreover, those economic actors
deeply involved in hyperliberal globalization—primarily corporations
and institutions of capital—also constitute an arm of a “global civil
society” in their efforts to regulate politics at the transnational level
and, in some instances, to intervene in domestic settings through spon-
sorship of functional projects at the local level. How these actors might
view postnational politics and citizenship is not entirely clear.1 Finally,
the ultimate form of these mutually constitutive “entities” is, as yet,
underdetermined; a collapse back into a more traditional international
state system cannot be ruled out, although it is highly unlikely, as I
have made clear throughout this book. The growth of various mecha-
nisms of transnational governance, strongly driven by processes linked
to economic globalization, suggest otherwise.
Prior to that discussion, however, I consider the question of
choices: What choices are available; what might we do? I begin with
a brief summary of my argument in this book and then ask: What
happens after authority? Next, I turn to questions about the future of
the nation-state: Will it survive? What will it do? Will something re-
place it? I discuss how the diffusion of jurisdictional authority from
the state to other actors is both fragmenting and integrating global
politics, but not in the conventionally understood territorial sense.
Finally, I raise a challenge to the conventional “state/nonstate” di-
chotomy that characterizes the international relations and global poli-
tics literature, and propose that we need to go far beyond this binary
if we are to understand and act on our future.
After Authority
In the preceding chapters of this book, I have argued that the basic
problem we face is best understood as a disjunction between contem-
158 Chapter 8
porary social change and people’s expectations about their individual

and collective futures. Changes in modes of production and reproduc-
tion have exposed us to what is, except during periods of war, a his-
torically high rate of social innovation and reorganization. This change
has progressed to the point that uncertainty has come to dominate
politics, both domestic and global, in ways that were rarely the case,
at such a large scale, in earlier times. We regard predictability (if not
stability) as central to contemporary life. It is predictability that allows
us to be reasonably certain that we can accomplish in the future what
we have planned today; it is predictability that lets us go beyond
fatalism to action.2 Or, to put the point another way, we expect both
our actions and the actions of others to be sufficiently patterned and
predictable that we do not have to live in a “State of Nature” in which
neighbors are enemies and no one can be trusted.3
Hobbes (1962) thought it necessary to create a Leviathan that
would prevent such a situation by imposing its authority on society.
Already more than three hundred years ago, he recognized in the
English Civil War the potential disorder inherent in the methodologi-
cal individualism that followed the collapse of centralized religious
authority and the rise of capitalism. He therefore sought to discover a
new source of rule—possibly based in Nature’s mathematics or sci-
ence—that could contain such disorder. But the joke, it turns out, has
been on us. All along we have been told that the mythical “war of all
against all,” in which life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” was a de-
scription of an antediluvian time, before authority and society, and that
it was only the morality of state and society that brought humanity to
a civilized condition.4 Instead, the State of Nature turns out to be our
future, a condition that, unwittingly or not, Leviathan itself has let
loose on the world.
In this instance, I have argued, it is the globalization of markets
that is undermining the state, a process set in train by the United States
after World War II, a process that may soon approach its apotheosis in
the “borderless world” (Ohmae 1991, 1995). This is hardly a new or
innovative argument—that the spread of market forces destroys the
basis for the social contract that Hobbes and others thought so neces-
sary to restrain human nature (Polanyi, 1944/1957)—and it is one that
is harshly critiqued by any number of analysts (see the The Economist,
1997; for counter arguments, see Hirsch, 1995; Ellis and Kumar, 1983).
What is new is, perhaps, the inversion of the sequence of events,
followed by the query: Who or what is to decide on an “authoritative

allocation of values” in the absence of authority? The World Federal-
ists sought (and continue to seek) global federation. William Ophuls
(Ophuls and Boyan, 1992) and Robert Heilbroner (1991) proposed
something akin to world dictatorship. George Bush’s New World Or-
der rested on American hegemony and discipline. Perhaps in the future
wealth or corporate tonnage will become the basis of authority, in
which case Bill Gates might become the global “Grand Poobah” or
Exxon-Mobil a new superpower. Or, conceivably, each individual and
her appetite will become her sole source of authority; if so, even the
corporation as we know it might not survive. Hyperbole, perhaps, but
in some places not so far from the truth.
What, then, is our future after authority? Most analysts peering
into the future try to describe the big picture: The world will be richer.
It will be happier. It will be poorer. It will be crowded. It will be
violent. It will be wired. To be sure: it may be all of those. But such
global generalizations, encapsulating in very short sound bites the
actions of the six (now) or 10 billion (by 2050 or so) individuals
populating the Earth, do not tell us very much about what those people
are up to, or will be up to. Yet, if the individual has become the new
sovereign, as I have argued in this book, what people do will matter,
whether they do it alone or in groups, whether they do it peacefully
or violently, whether they do it for self-interest or the community. And
why they do what they will do will matter, too, because, in the final
analysis, their sources of authority for their actions will be important
to politics.
In making this point, I do not mean to suggest that many of the
problems that give rise to both clichés and questions of rule and rules
are, somehow, not transnational, transboundary, or world-encompassing
in nature, or that national, cultural, and class differences are not im-
plicated in them. I do mean to argue, however, that these problems,
factors, and forces are not implicated in world politics in the ways that
the Huntingtons, Barbers, Fukuyamas, Ohmaes, or Kaplans of our day
might claim they are. Indeed, it is more probable that, after authority,
authority will originate less in the actions of “great women and men”
of state than in the patterns of everyday politics, of politics among
people, locally and globally. These patterns will have less to do with
hegemonic stories of a dangerous world and the actions that follow,
and more to do with fairly mundane matters, with everyday questions
160 Chapter 8
of governance, citizenship, and even civic virtue: Who rules? Whose

rules? What rules? What kind of rules? At what level? In what form?
Who decides? On what basis?
It is fair to say that these questions, and other similar ones, are
already being answered. People’s responses to them are evident in their
patterns of behavior in a number of political arenas, in the reorganiza-
tion of politics around functional issues such as environmental restora-
tion and protection, human rights, gender, indigenous peoples, labor,
and culture, as well as trade, investment, property rights, and product
standards. While some of these patterns and tendencies might seem
contradictory (and are), in that their orientations and consequences are
often in opposition, they are all part of what I have called, elsewhere,
“global civil society” and global governance (Lipschutz, 1996)5 and they
are all generating new types of institutional roles and relations, member-
ships, and categories of belonging (indeed, were we speaking of nation
and state, we might call these roles “citizenship”). To a growing degree,
it is in functional arenas such as these, and the ways in which people act
toward them and with each other, that we must look in order to see the
emerging outlines of twenty-first century politics among people.
The skeptical reader might rightfully ask, “What is the evidence
for this global civil society and these new forms of citizenship? The state,
after all, remains the most powerful and authoritative actor in global af-
fairs. Moreover, if such things do exist, what do they presage?” Would
they mean the disappearance of the state-system and a true “postsovereign,
postinternational” world politics, as James Rosenau (1990; 1997) has put
it? Are not “sovereignty-free” transnational networks and actors so depen-
dent on the structures created and supported by states that they cannot
exist without them? How could a global politics function if its basic units
were not defined in territorial terms? And, are global civil society and new
forms of citizenship plausible in the face of the communitarian and ethnic
forces tearing apart so many countries? Can there be a truly democratic,
transparent, and representative global politics without the state?
The State(s) of Our Future
In recent years, speculation about the “future of the state” has been
rife (as evident from this book and others cited throughout). What is
most conspicuous, and provides the basis for solid skepticism about
the unchanging nature of world politics, are seemingly contradictory
tendencies evident in world politics, as we have seen in earlier chap-
ters.6 On the one hand, we are offered the notion of a single world,
integrated via a globalizing economy, in which the sovereign state
appears to be losing much of its authority and control over domestic
and foreign affairs (Ohmae, 1991; 1995; Strange, 1996; Woodall, 1995).
These trends appear to point toward an eventual world state or federa-
tion, along the lines of the European Union, only bigger. On the other
hand, and contrary to the expectations of neofunctionalists and others,
we have seen once-unified countries fracture into war-ridden frag-
ments, in which an ever shrinking state exercises sovereignty over
diminishing bits of territory. Both processes involve, as Susan Strange
(1996) put it, a “retreat of the state,” albeit in quite different ways. But
they also suggest that integration will not lead to a world federation of
states and regions even as fragmentation does not presage a return to
national sovereignty and a more traditional international relations among
five hundred or more states. So, what is going on?
In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi (1944/57) argued that
the self-regulating market was an ideal that could not be fully achieved,
lest it destroy human civilization; the two world wars almost accom-
plished this task (and the Third World War that never happened, but
might yet, would surely do so). In recent decades, we have tended to
forget his prescient warnings.7 The globalization of production and
capital over the past half century has been accompanied by liberaliza-
tion and, at the rhetorical level at least, a commitment to the deregu-
lation of markets. But in deregulation lies an apparent paradox of our
times: a liberal economy cannot exist without rules—so, where are
they? Indeed, as I noted in chapter 7, markets require rules in order to
function in an orderly fashion (Mead, 1995/96; Attali, 1997).
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the first steps
toward globalization were brought to a halt by national governments
and elites who saw threats to their autonomy and prerogatives. The
same pattern followed in the 1930s, and there are a few signs that this
may be happening again, today. Free traders and their economist sup-
porters decry the protectionist trends they see developing in trade re-
lations among the industrialized economies, warning that the world is
going down the same path it has trodden before (Bergsten, 1996).
162 Chapter 8
Perhaps they are correct, perhaps not. It is certainly not beyond the
realm of possibility that competitive geopolitical blocs could (re)emerge
in the future, as feared by some observers of the European Union, the
North American Free Trade Area, and the once-feared and now dor-
mant New Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere under Japanese tutelage. There
remains, however, enough residual collective memory, and the World
Trade Organization, to suggest that such an outcome might be avoided.
But there are good reasons, too, for arguing that contemporary
international economic relations bear little if any resemblance to the
1930s. As I have noted throughout this book, nation-states are caught in
a contradiction of their own making and, for all the parallels to the past,
are treading down a path they have not walked before. On the one hand,
they are decentralizing, deregulating, and liberalizing in order to provide
more attractive economic environments for financial capital and, as they
do so, dismantling the safety net provided by the welfare state. That
safety net, it should be noted, includes not only assurance of health and
safety, environmental protection, public education, and so on, but also
standard sets of rules that “level the economic playing field” and ensure
the sanctity of contracts, the latter two both desired by capital. On the
other hand, the shift of regulation from the national to the international
level is creating a new skein of rules and regulations.
Even the British-governed international economy of the nine-
teenth century, often idealized by gold bugs and free traders, was not
a free-for-all. It was regulated, if only by the constraints of the gold
standard and the resultant behavior of financiers in London and New
York. Today’s markets are hardly self-regulating, either. While “de-
regulation” is the mantra repeated endlessly in virtually all national
capitals and by all international capitalists, it is domestic deregulation
vis à vis other producers that is desired, not the wholesale elimination
of all rules (Vogel, 1996; Graham, 1996). Selective deregulation at
home may create a lower-cost environment in which to produce, but
deregulation everywhere creates uncertainty and economic instability.
Hence, transnational regulation and global welfarism—the successors
to Bretton Woods—are becoming increasingly important in keeping
the global economic system together and working.8 The difficulty with
the globalization of rules is, to repeat an earlier point: What rules and
whose rules? Who pays for them? Who decides what they will say?
And how are those decisions made?
There is another important problem here. With national econo-

mies, there was at least the possibility of addressing domestic
maldistribution; a global economy hardly permits even this. As de-
regulated capitalism works its way within countries, the economic
playing field develops pits, holes, and undulations, and the distribution
of wealth both within and between countries, groups, and classes
becomes more and more uneven. This, as might be expected, can pose
political problems both domestically and internationally (see, e.g.,
Pollack, 1997; Kapstein, 1996). For example, in the United States and
other industrialized countries, groups of small-scale fixed capitalists,
property owners, workers, and others chafe under the new economic
environment. But individual countries cannot move to reregulate be-
cause there are strong interests who benefit from domestic deregula-
tion, and to reimpose political management might also be to give up
a competitive advantage to other countries and their firms.
The future does not, however, lie with petty capitalists or labor
who operate within the limits of subnational economies; these groups
are, generally speaking, of little interest to Wall Street—except for
their role in domestic consumption—and they are rarely a locus of
technological and organizational innovation.9 Profits are to be found in
the high-tech and information industries, in transnational finance and
investment, and in flexible production and accumulation. This means
looking beyond national borders for ways in which to deploy capital,
technology, and design in order to maximize returns and access to
foreign markets. One obstacle to such moves is that the transaction
costs associated with having to deal with 50- or 150-odd sets of na-
tional regulations can be quite high. High–tech, financial, and
transnational sectors would, therefore, prefer to see the playing field
made level among countries—preferably as inexpensively as possible,
but level nonetheless—through single sets of rules that apply to all
countries, much as is supposed to be the case within the European
Union or among the members of international regimes (Vogel, 1995).
And so, although it is often argued that there is no global govern-
ment, and that regulatory harmonization is not only difficult but also
unfair (Bhagwati, 1993), global regulations have been and are being
promulgated all the time. The General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs,
and its successor, the World Trade Organization, provide examples of
regulatory harmonization for the benefit of capital and country. The
164 Chapter 8
Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer is a

regulatory system designed to harmonize rules governing production
of ozone-damaging substances. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
is intended to regulate the production and use of atomic bombs and
fissile materials by its signatories. The human rights regime is meant
to set a standard for the fair and just treatment of citizens by their
states and governments as well as by their fellow citizens. Interna-
tional meetings such as the Conference on Population and Develop-
ment in Cairo aim at the promulgation of a globally shared set of
norms and rules. The ISO 14000 rules recently issued by the Interna-
tional Organization for Standardization are meant to provide a frame-
work for “green” management by corporations. And even international
financial institutions, such as the World Bank, are becoming involved
in the provision of health and welfare services, albeit as a supplement
to the large-scale projects they traditionally support.
Indeed, the raft of regimes and international institutions associated
with the United Nations system and other transnational groups might be
said to constitute something of an incipient international regulatory system
(although there are many holes in this “safety net”). As such, it serves
two critical functions. First, it sets in place norms and rules that are
meant to apply everywhere, even though these standards are sometimes
less rigorous than the citizens of particular countries would like, and
observation and enforcement remain very problematic. Second, the sys-
tem makes it possible for national governments to tell their citizens that
a particular problem is being addressed but that they—both citizen and
representatives—have no control over the content of the rules, and that
domestic politics must not be permitted to intrude into either the pro-
mulgation or functioning of the rules. Note that political intervention
into the market system is taking place here, albeit out of reach of do-
mestic interest groups, lobbyists, and logrolling. The absence of ac-
countability on the part of these global institutions is not so easily
shrugged off and serious questions are being raised about this matter
(Gill, 1993, 1995). Nevertheless, we see here the beginnings of global
governance (and taxation) although, as yet, not representation.
There is little question that the “state” will remain a central actor
in world politics for some time to come, by virtue of its capabilities,
its material and discursive powers, and its domination of the political
imaginary. Nevertheless, what has been regarded as the hard core of
jurisdictional authority of the state—a naturalized fiction if ever there

was one—is diffusing away throughout an emergent, multilevel and
quite diverse system of globalizing and localizing governance and
behavior.10 Some have suggested that these changing patterns consti-
tute a “new (or neo) medievalism”; others have proposed as organizing
principles “heteronomy”11 or “heterarchy.”12 In discussing the first of
these three concepts, Ole Wæver (1995: note 59) argues that
for some four centuries, political space was organized through the
principle of territorially defined units with exclusive rights inside,
and a special kind of relations on the outside: International rela-
tions, foreign policy, without any superior authority. There is no
longer one level that is clearly the most important to refer to but,
rather, a set of overlapping authorities. (First emphasis in origi-
nal; second emphasis added)
What is critical here is not political space, but political authority, in

two senses: first, the ability to get things done, and second, recognition
as the legitimate source of jurisdiction and action (as opposed to one’s
ability to apply force or coercion in the more conventionally under-
stood sense). As John Ruggie (1989: 28) has pointed out, in a political
system—even a relatively unsocialized one—who has “the right to act
as a power [or authority] is at least as important as an actor’s capa-
bility to force unwilling others to do its bidding” (emphasis added). In
this neomedieval world, authority will arise more from the control of
knowledge and the power that flows from that control than outright
material capabilities. The power to coerce will, of course, remain
important, but most people do not need to be coerced; they want to be
convinced.
This is meant neither as a teleological nor a necessarily progres-
sivist argument. The eventual content of global governance and an
international regulatory system could serve the interests of a narrow
stratum of political and economic elites and prove profoundly conser-
vative and reactionary (Gill, 1995). The result might be a repetition of
previous catastrophes, as the pain of globalization bites deeply at home
(Kapstein, 1996). There are disquieting trends to which one can point—
such as the globalization of surveillance through information technolo-
gies and struggles to construct new, albeit bankrupt, states. Still, the
future is not (yet) etched in stone.
166 Chapter 8
Aux Armes, Citoyen?
What this discussion has not, so far, defined is the relationship be-
tween individuals and the new forms of political action inherent in the
globalization of functional authority. That discussion requires an in-
quiry into the nature of membership in a political community, that is,
citizenship. In its standard form, citizenship is defined as a collection
of rights and obligations that give individuals a formal legal identity
within a state and society. The Westernized (and, some would argue,
masculinized) philosophical problem of how individuals come together
to form political collectives in which they are members has puzzled
political philosophers for centuries. The apparent tension between
human beings as highly individualistic entities and the societies they
nevertheless have created led historically to such propositions as Le-
viathan, the Social Contract, the Watchman State, Civil Republican-
ism, the Welfare State, and even the Invisible Hand. Indeed, the problem
of how State and Society came to be remains something of a puzzle
to Western theorists, even today.
These are not, however, the only ways to conceive of citizenship.
As Bryan Turner (1997:5) puts it in the introduction to the first issue of
a journal called Citizenship Studies, “[T]hese legal rights and obliga-
tions [of citizenship] have been put together historically as sets of social
institutions such as the jury system, parliaments and welfare states.”
Turner goes on to argue that a “political” conception of citizenship is
typically focused on “political rights, the state and the individual,” whereas
a “sociological” definition involves the nature of people’s entitlements
to scarce resources, confers a particular cultural identity on individuals
and groups, and includes the “idea of a political community as the basis
of citizenship . . . typically the nation-state.” That is,
when individuals become citizens, they not only enter into a set
of institutions that confers upon them rights and obligations, they
not only acquire an identity, they are not only socialized into civic
virtues, but they also become members of a political community
with a particular territory and history. (Turner, 1997:9)
The advantage of this definition is that it ties together the material

substructure of citizenship with the superstructure of rules, rights,
behaviors, attitudes, and obligations that constitute the citizen vis-à-vis
other citizens and the state. The market is part of this institutional
structure and, historically, the rules underwriting and functioning of
markets have been guaranteed by the authority and activities of the
state.13
In “normal” times, the contradictions between substructure and
superstructure are minimal—or are either not very evident or are foisted
off on the poor and powerless as “natural”—and citizenship is a rela-
tively stable construct. Under those circumstances, people follow the
rules and expect to receive commensurate rewards in return (see chap-
ter 6). Less and less, however, are these “normal” times, as I have
argued throughout this book. For better or worse, then, the tensions
between globalization and fragmentation cannot be addressed by at-
tempts to establish exclusive domains of society and citizen, either by
philosophy or force. Such solutions attempt to “imagine communities”
(Anderson, 1991) into being without taking into account the material
forces that are, on the one hand, keeping imaginary communities from
becoming “real” and, on the other hand, pulling real ones apart.
The core problematic here is that the forces of globalization are
disrupting the boundaries that, for the past two centuries, contained
societies and national communities and provided the basis for contex-
tual forms of citizenship and belonging (Shapiro and Alker, 1996).
Attempts to reestablish these boundaries and the civic communities
within them through disciplinary measures, whether domestic or for-
eign, risk reproducing the logic of antagonistic nation-states in a much
more fragmented form, as newly imagined communities resist the
hegemony of the old one (see the essays in Crawford and Lipschutz,
1998).
If territorial units are no longer the logical focus for political
loyalty, can some other form of political community substitute? What
can replace the citizen’s allegiance to state as the new basis for poli-
tics? If the rampant individualism of the market is creating a world of
10 billion statelets, how can people come together to act collectively?
In principle, states might be able to act against the tendency of
marketization to diminish their authority within their national boundaries.
In practice, and short of a repeat of a global crisis akin to the 1930s
(which was, after all, one of the reasons for the post–World War II
globalization project), it is difficult to imagine such a restoration tak-
ing place. For reasons I have discussed elsewhere, having to do with
168 Chapter 8
the notion of global governance (Lipschutz, 1996), we need to look

beyond the nation-state to answer the questions posed above. In what
follows, I want to suggest that there is a real problem with thinking
about alternatives to citizenship, especially if we are focused on ways
to restore them within the “iron cage” of the contemporary nation-state
form.
In recent years, research into transnational social movements,
nongovernmental organizations, global networks and coalitions, and
global governance structures has represented the core of thinking about
alternatives to the state among academics and intellectuals (see, e.g.,
Princen and Finger, 1994; Wapner, 1996; Mathews, 1997; Keck and
Sikkink, 1998; Lipschutz, 1996 and the citations therein). Still, virtually
all that has been written about these trends continues to use the language
and framework of state and “nonstate” actors. As Paul Wapner and
others have pointed out, this focus on the state and its “discontents”
reflects a certain poverty of imagination about other types of nonnational,
postnational political arrangements. In particular, this singular focus leaves
out those other discussions that avoid or even ignore the state/nonstate
dichotomy. It is at this very point that debates stall over the future of
citizenship, politics, and authority under globalization.
Is there another way to think about alternatives to the state? To
develop this line of thought, I draw on a body of theory that, at first
glance, might appear far removed from international relations theory:
the work of Judith Butler.14 In her 1990 book, Gender Trouble, Butler
uses the work of Michel Foucault to show how, in the case of gender,
“juridical systems of power produce the subjects they invariably come
to represent.”
The question of “the subject” is crucial for politics, and for femi-
nist politics in particular, because juridical subjects are invariably
produced through certain exclusionary practices that do not “show”
once the juridical structure of politics has been established. In
other words, the political construction of the subject proceeds
with certain legitimating and exclusionary aims, and these politi-
cal operations are effectively concealed and naturalized by a
political analysis that takes juridical structures as their founda-
tion. Juridical power inevitably “produces” what it claims merely
to represent; hence, politics must be concerned with this dual
function of power: the juridical and the productive. (Butler, 1990:2)
Butler (1990:2) goes on to argue that “the category of ‘women,’ the

subject of feminism, is produced and restrained by the very structures
of power through which emancipation is sought.” Elsewhere in the
book (112), she writes that “if gender is not tied to [biological] sex,
either casually or expressively, then gender is a kind of action that can
potentially proliferate beyond the binary limits imposed by the appar-
ent binary of sex” (parenthetical term added).15 Butler (1990:9–13)
also points to the work of Luce Irigaray who writes that, in the hege-
monic discourses of gender with which we are most familiar (even if
not in agreement), women are not the opposite of men but, rather (if
I understand the argument correctly) are not-men (my words). Butler
(1990:11) puts it thus.
The female sex is thus also the subject that is not one. The rela-
tion between masculine and feminine cannot be represented in a
signifying economy in which the masculine constitutes the closed
circle of signifier and signified. (Emphasis in original)
I quote Butler at length here because her analysis can be trans-

posed from her focus on women (as “not-men”), and the term’s al-
ways-casual pairing with “men,” to what are conventionally called
nonstate actors (i.e., not-state). The term “nonstate actors” is paired
with “state” just as casually in international politics literature to de-
note those political collectivities that act in the inter/transnational realm
but that lack specific reified attributes of the state—territory, sover-
eignty, legitimate monopoly of violence. Such collective actors have
the same relationship to the “signifying economy in which the [state]
constitutes the closed circle of signifier and signified,” as the feminine
has to the masculine. The state, in this “signifying economy,” becomes
a “naturalistic necessity” (Butler, 1990:33) against which other politi-
cal actors are treated and evaluated in terms of their (nonnatural) in-
ability to replicate the symbolic and functional roles of a state for lack
of appropriate (natural) tools. The result is that international relations
(IR) scholars are always asking, “Yes, but can nonstate actors do what
the state does?” when a more appropriate query might be “Is what the
state has been doing even necessary?”
To give an example, several years ago, as the war in Bosnia was
nearing the end of its most violent phase, Michael Mandelbaum (1996),
170 Chapter 8
the “Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the

Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins
University, and director of the Project on East-West Relations at the
Council on Foreign Relations,” attacked the Clinton administration for
conducting “foreign policy as social work.” Responding to then-na-
tional security advisor Anthony Lake’s questionable argument that “I
think Mother Teresa and Ronald Reagan were both trying to do the
same thing,” Mandelbaum (1996:18) riposted:
While Mother Teresa is an admirable person and social work a

noble profession, conducting American foreign policy by her
example [sic; it was not social work!] is an expensive proposition.
The world is a big place filled with distressed people, all of
whom, by these lights, have a claim to American attention.
Not only did Mandelbaum ignore the role of the American state in
fostering the “noble profession” of social work, he also fell into the
traditional realist trap of regarding such intervention as unworthy of
state attention, presumably seeing it as an activity fit only for nonstate
actors. The American state has military power for a purpose, and it
must use it!
A further, and much more fundamental, consequence of this bi-
nary treatment of state/nonstate was raised in chapters 4 and 6. Not
only must a nation have a state of its own (or, perhaps, vice versa), a
nation without a state is incomplete and impotent. It cannot act in
international politics in a fully capable (and male) fashion; it must not
even accept anything less than a fully sovereign (and potent) state. To
remain a “not-state” is to not exist. Such views, to put it mildly, are
absolute nonsense. More than that, they cast the matter of after author-
ity in quite a different light than a choice between micro states and
macro markets, and suggest a program that is quite distinct from the
integration/fragmentation dichotomy of the state/not-state binary.
To go beyond this, toward a “proliferation” of legitimate and
authoritative actors in the inter/transnational realm, requires us to think
(and act) quite differently where global politics are concerned; as Butler
(1990:33) writes about gender
To expose the contingent acts that create the appearance of natu-

ralistic necessity . . . is a task that now takes on the added burden
of showing how the very notion of the subject, intelligible only

through its appearance as gendered [or state/not-state], admits of
possibilities that have been forcibly foreclosed by the various
reifications of gender [state/not-state] that have constituted its
contingent ontologies. (Parenthetical terms added)
In practice, this is a rather more difficult proposition to operationalize,

but to the extent that theory informs practice (and practice informs
theory), opening up for examination the possibilities beyond the bi-
nary can make a contribution to such a project. For the moment, it is
incumbent upon us to recognize that even the term “state” is applied
to many, rather different political entities. Such difference ought to be
welcomed as providing openings for imagining communities, rather
than being bemoaned or ignored. And, if we are to speculate on alter-
natives to citizenship in the nation-state, we ought first to look to the
alternatives to the nation-state that already exist in some form. As Iris
Marion Young (1990:234) argues, “A model of a transformed society
must begin from the material structures that are given to us at this time
in history.”
Below, I discuss three alternatives, although these hardly exhaust
the universe of possibilities. First, I expand on “global civil society,”
which builds on parallels between state and domestic civil society,
without necessarily postulating the emergence of a global state. The
second involves the emergence of counterhegemonic social movements,
which could provide the basis for new and innovative forms of politi-
cal organization and action. The third focuses on the partial
deterritorialization of political identity and political community.
Global Civil Society
In the heteronomous (dis)order of the future, authority will likely be

distributed among many foci of political action, organized to address
specific issue-areas rather than to exercise a generalized rule over a
specific territory (Lipschutz, 1996: chap. 8). Territorially based politi-
cal jurisdictions will continue to exist, but they will be complemented
by others whose responsibilities will lie elsewhere. As Crook, Pakulski,
and Waters (1992:34–35) point out, the relationship between actors
and jurisdictions might not necessarily follow logically from their
172 Chapter 8
apparent functions. Schools are as likely to engage in environmental

restoration as environmental organizations are to become involved in
education at the K–12 level (see also Lipschutz, 1996: chap. 5).
Elsewhere, I have argued that “global civil society” could repre-
sent a structure of actors and networks within which these new au-
thorities emerge (Lipschutz, 1997c). As conventionally understood,
civil society includes those political, cultural, and social organizations
of modern societies that have not been established or mandated by the
state or created as part of the institutionalized political system of the
state (e.g., political parties). These groups are, nevertheless, engaged
in a variety of political activities.16 Globalizing the concept extends
this arrangement into the transnational arena, where it constitutes a
protosociety composed of local, national, and global institutions, cor-
porations, and nongovernmental organizations. Global civil society can
be understood as shorthand for both the actors and networks that
constitute a “new spatial mosaic of global innovation” (Gordon,
1995:196) and the growth in neofunctional authority resulting from a
“proliferation” of political actors beyond, above, and beside the state.
But civil society and the state are not formations independent of
each other; “sovereignty-bound” and “sovereignty-free,” as James
Rosenau (1990) has put it, are not fully dichotomous conditions. A
state relies on some version of civil society for its legitimacy, a civil
society cannot exist without the authority conveyed by the state, whether
it is democratic or not. Indeed, we might go so far as to say that the
two are mutually constitutive and derive their roles and identities from
their relationship with each other. Of course, civic associations such as
bowling leagues do operate quite autonomously of the state, yet we
would be hard put to claim that they have no relationship whatsoever
with the state. The members of a bowling league play according to
“official” rules, wearing clothes and using equipment that have been
vetted for safety by state officials, paying with money printed by the
state, playing in a building whose every basic feature has been man-
dated by state regulations and constructed by virtue of state-granted
permits, having arrived there in licensed vehicles on roads built by the
state, etc., etc.
By the same token, the state is continually reproduced by the
beliefs and practices of civic associations, whether or not they are
overtly political. The bowling league does little or nothing that delib-
erately and consciously helps to reproduce the state—aside, perhaps,

from its individual members paying taxes and respecting its institu-
tions. Nevertheless, the normal activities of the league’s members serve
to reproduce the normal existence of those conditions that legitimate
the state. Bowlers, after all, rarely blow up state buildings or take up
arms against the government (and were they to do so, they might
actually intensify the state’s presence and legitimacy). None of this is
to argue that bowling leagues are authoritative, neofunctional entities,
but neither are they mere venues for throwing balls and drinking beer.
Why does this matter? It matters because declining state author-
ity will, in all likelihood, be supplemented or replaced by, or subli-
mated in, some kind of alternative political framework, which could be
similar to a world state or very different. The late Richard Gordon’s
(1995) research suggested that the relationship of production to poli-
tics, and the politics of production, are changing rather radically from
what they once were. The strategies of corporate actors and other
holders of capital take less and less cognizance of the residual author-
ity and power of individual states to regulate them. More and more,
they engage in individual and collective attempts to self-regulate (as,
for example, in the multifarious activities of the International Organi-
zation for Standardization—ISO) or to generate supranational regula-
tion (as in the World Trade Organization).
These findings point also toward the fact that political commu-
nity—even a federal state—is not restricted to discrete levels of gov-
ernment. As Theda Skocpol (1985:28) points out:
On the one hand, states may be viewed as organizations through

which official collectivities may pursue collective goals, realizing
them more or less effectively given available state resources in
relation to social settings. On the other hand, states may be viewed
more macroscopically as configurations of organizations and ac-
tion that influence the meanings and methods of politics for all
groups and classes in society.
Skocpol offers here a conception of the state that is, perhaps, too broad
in encompassing society, but her point is, in my view, an important
one. The state is more than just its constitution, agencies, rules, and
roles, and it is embedded, as well, in a system of governance. From
this view, state and civil society can be seen as mutually constitutive
174 Chapter 8
and, where the state engages in government, civil society often plays
a role in governance.
What is striking, especially in terms of relationships between
nongovernmental organizations and institutionalized mechanisms of
government, as well as capital and international regimes, is the growth
of institutions of governance at and across all levels of analysis,
from the local to the global (see, e.g., Leatherman, Pagnucco, and
Smith, 1994: esp. pp. 23–28). This growth suggests, to repeat the
argument made above, that even though there is no world govern-
ment, as such, there may well be an emerging system of global
governance. Subsumed within this system of governance are both
institutionalized regulatory arrangements—some of which we call
“regimes”—and less formalized norms, rules, and procedures that
pattern behavior without the presence of written constitutions or
material power.17 This system is not a “state,” as we commonly
understand the term, but it is statelike, in Skocpol’s second sense.
Indeed, we can see emerging patterns of behavior in global politics
based on alliances between coalitions in global civil society and
various international governance arrangements (see, e.g., Wilmer,
1993, on indigenous peoples alliances).
What constitutes the equivalent of citizenship in such a sys-
tem of global governance? The interests of transnational capital are
represented, to some degree, in the international financial regimes
but, so far, there is little if any global regulation for the rest of us
(Lipschutz, 1999d). There are no mechanisms for representation of
anything other than nation-states (although a number of groups and
organizations do have observer status in the United Nations Gen-
eral Assembly). There are only a very few judicial fora in which
actors other than nation-states can bring international legal actions
(although, again, this situation is slowly changing). The idea of the
“world” citizen is a rather empty one, while arguments about glo-
bal “cosmopolitanism” rarely acknowledge just how few are the
members of this class. For the moment, therefore, the answer to
this question is less than clear. In the longer term, however, we
might expect to see the issues of membership and representation
become central to support for the institutions and mechanisms of
global governance.
Counterhegemonic Social Movements
A second alternative is related to global civil society but focuses more

on the emergence of what are called “counterhegemonic social move-
ments.” Robert Cox (1987) and Stephen Gill (1993, 1994), among
others, have used a Gramscian framework to speculate on the political
possibilities of organized opposition to the hegemonic tendencies of
global capital and authority. They argue, in essence, that contemporary
progressive social movements represent social forces challenging the
“historic bloc” that comprises the contemporary nexus of power rooted
in states and capital. According to Gill (1994:195)
Counter-hegemonic social movements and associated political

organizations must mobilize their capabilities and create the pos-
sibility for the democratization of power and production. . . . [W]e
might witness a 1990s version of Polanyi’s “double movement”
as social movements are remobilized and new coalitions are formed
to protect society from the unfettered logic of disciplinary neo-
liberalism and its associated globalizing forces.
How these challengers will proceed is somewhat less clear, although

Cox, Gill, and others believe that the growing discursive power of
“organic intellectuals” may play a central role in mobilizing these
movements.
There is nothing new about organic intellectuals, per se; what is
new is the scale at which they must do their work. Michael Mann
(1993), drawing on the writings of Antonio Gramsci, has written about
the emergence of national states in Europe and North America during
the 1700s and 1800s, and the economic, political, and social revolu-
tions and changes that took place throughout the “long” nineteenth
century. Put briefly, Mann sees the rise of organic intellectuals, who
played an essential role in the creation of the modern state, as central
to the transition from royal to popular sovereignty and contemporary
conceptions of citizenship (they were all men, and were seeking to
establish new loci of authority, so it is not surprising that citizenship
was defined largely in male terms). They filled primarily a discursive
role in a gradual process of social change, by developing and articu-
lating the ideas and practices that animated the political and social
176 Chapter 8
upheavals of those times. Mann observes that, while material interests

and needs were always central to popular mobilization, emotional and
ideational incentives were at least as important.
More than this, the ideas and arguments of the organic intellec-
tuals were framed in terms of “progress,” promising a better future
through political, economic, and social reorganization. Nationalism,
liberalism, socialism, and other “isms” that reified the strong state
were teleological ideologies produced by these organic intellectuals.
Without their communicating these arguments and putting them into
practice, the nineteenth century might have been a much quieter, but
less democratic, time. As it was, the centralized nation-states that have
dominated world politics for the past century were, for better or worse,
legitimated by the ideas of these intellectuals, if not constructed by
them. As Mann (1993:42) has argued:
Capitalism and discursive literacy media were the dual faces of a

civil society diffusing throughout eighteenth-century European civi-
lization. They were not reducible to each other, although they were
entwined. . . . Nor were they more than partly caged by dominant
classes, churches, military elites, and states, although they were
variably encouraged and structured by them. Thus, they were partly
transnational and interstitial to other power organizations. . . . Civil
societies were always entwined with states—and they become more
so during the long nineteenth century.
Here I would propose that the “organic intellectuals” that operate within
these counterhegemonic social movements constitute a transnational
cadre that could help to create the “double movement” discussed by
Polanyi and Gill.
I do not refer here to populist opposition to globalization, as put
forth by both the left and the right. Such movements seek to restore
the primacy of the nation-state in the regulation of spheres of produc-
tion and social life, although they have rather different ideas about the
ends of such a restoration. Rather, I refer to more nuanced critiques of
current modes of transnational regulation and their lack of representa-
tion, transparency, and accountability. Globalization offers a space for
political organizing and activism of which these organic intellectuals
and the mobilizers and members of nascent political communities are
well-positioned to take advantage.
Political Deterritorialization
Can we imagine political arrangements in which citizenship is pos-

sible yet not dependent on territorial units, such as the nation-state? A
deterritorialized political community would have to be based not on
space, but on flows; not on where people live, but what links them
together. That is, the identity between politics and people would not
be rooted in a specific piece of reified “homeland” whose boundaries,
fixed in the mind and on the ground, excluded all others. Instead, to
slightly revise Michael J. Shapiro, this identity would be based on “a
heterogenous set of . . . power centers integrated through structures of
communication” (Shapiro, 1997:206) as well as knowledge and prac-
tices specific to each community. Kathy Ferguson (1996:451–52) ar-
gues that
collective identity based on control of territory sponsors a zero-

sum calculation: either we belong here or they do. One can imag-
ine collective identities that are deterritorialized, knit together in
some other ways, perhaps from shared memories, daily practices,
concrete needs, specific relationships to people, locations, and
histories. Such productions would be more narrative than territo-
rial; they might not be so exclusive because they are not so relent-
lessly spatial. Connection to a particular place could still be
honored as one dimension of identity, but its intensities could be
leavened by less competitive claims. Participation in such identi-
ties could be self-consciously partial, constructed, mobile; some-
thing one does and redoes every day, not a docile space one
simply occupies and controls. Empathy across collective identi-
ties constructed as fluid and open could enrich, rather than endan-
ger, one’s sense of who one is.
This is, perhaps, the most difficult political alternative to conceptualize,

and we do not yet have much to go on. There is much talk, these days,
of “virtual communities,” composed of “netizens” linked through the
Internet and the World Wide Web, but this is hardly a political entity,
even in its broadest definition (e.g., Aizu, 1998). While the networks
through which individuals and groups are connected provide conduits
for communication of knowledge and patterns of behavior, collective
political action in specific places is mediated by the networks. The idea
178 Chapter 8
of a web-based political community acting collectively (as opposed to

wielding influence or lobbying political authorities) remains problem-
atic (Lipschutz, 1996: chap. 3).
A deterritorialized political community, it seems to me, must
have a much stronger material base (Lipschutz, 1996: chap. 7). Iris
Marion Young (1990:171) develops one such idea, offering an “egali-
tarian politics of difference,” a “culturally pluralist democratic” poli-
tics through which “Difference . . . emerges not as a description of the
attributes of a group, but as a function of the relations between groups
and the interactions of groups with institutions.” These groups would
be social groups, that is, “collective[s] of people who have an affinity
with one another because of a set of practices or way of life.” Such
groups would be provided with “mechanisms for the effective recog-
nition and representation of distinct voices and perspectives of
those . . . constituent groups that are oppressed or disadvantaged”
(Young, 1990:186, 184). Young proposes (1990:184) that
such group representation implies institutional mechanisms and

public resources supporting (1) self-organization of group mem-
bers so that they achieve collective empowerment and a reflective
understanding of their collective experience and interests in the
context of society; (2) group analysis and group generation of
policy proposals in institutionalized contexts where decisionmakers
are obliged to show that their deliberations have taken group
perspectives into consideration; and (3) group veto power regard-
ing specific policies that affect a group directly.
Such arrangements cannot, of course, be created ex nihilo. In the United

States, the already-existing material structures are, Young argues, “large-
scale industry and urban centers.” Within this context, “neighborhood
assemblies [could be] a basic unit of democratic participation, which
might be composed of representatives from workplaces, block coun-
cils, local churches and clubs, and so on as well as individuals” (Young,
1990:234, 252). Saskia Sassen (1994, 1998) makes a somewhat simi-
lar argument in her work on global cities.
Although this vision is attractive and well within our capabilities
to pursue, there are, nonetheless, both conceptual and practical prob-
lems that remain to be addressed. For example, it appears that, in
Young’s vision, such urban assemblies would remain part of a larger
national unit, to which they would, presumably, profess some kind of

loyalty and whose authority they would recognize as final. Sociologically,
in the absence of national redistribution, dependence on locally available
resources would render some cities relatively rich while others would be
forced to struggle along in poverty (much as is the case within and be-
tween cities and countries today; for a critical look at notions of local
autonomy, see Lipschutz, 1991). Without some kind of national group- or
city-based assembly with real political power, national authorities would
tend to ignore cities, as they already often do in the United States. Finally,
how would such a scheme play out in other countries?
None of this is to suggest that a city or region-based political
system could not emerge in parallel to the state system; some writers,
such as Kenichi Ohmae (1995), propose that this is already happening.
There is a long history of successful city-states as well as city-based
leagues, and some cities and groups of cities are deliberately reviving
those forms (albeit for mostly economic reasons). Many cities already
pursue their own “foreign policies,” both economic and political. And,
the urban political machines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries certainly provide a model for a city-based, sociological con-
ception of citizenship. Whether the city can provide the basis for glo-
bal democratization, citizenship, and new foci of authority—especially
when capital is so footloose and fancy-free and cities are competing
with each other for capital investment like neighboring countries buy-
ing military weapons (see chapter 7)—will be demonstrated only
through theory and activism.
One World or Many?
Do the foregoing notions suggest a global future that might, just pos-
sibly, be less dismal than that of the realists and catastrophists? Per-
haps. But such a future will not happen without deliberate action. In
the final chapter of The Great Transformation, Polanyi pointed, once
again, to the way in which the loosing of the self-regulating market on
nineteenth-century society in the interests of certain elites led to the
inevitable destruction of that society:
Nineteenth century civilization . . . disintegrated as the result

of . . . the measures which society adopted in order not to be, in
180 Chapter 8
its turn, annihilated by the action of the self-regulating

market. . . . [T]he elementary requirements of an organized social
life provided the century with its dynamics and produced the
typical strains and stresses which ultimately destroyed that soci-
ety. External wars merely hastened its destruction. (Polanyi, 1944/
1957:249)
He (1944/1957:254) nevertheless ended on a brighter note, foreseeing

after World War II “economic collaboration of governments and the
liberty to organize national life at will” (emphasis in original; this is
a formula that sounds very much like John Ruggie’s embedded liber-
alism; 1983a, 1991, 1995). This would require freedom to be extended
and maintained under unbreakable rules.
Juridical and actual freedom can be made wider and more general
than ever before; regulation and control can achieve freedom not
only for the few, but for all. Freedom not as an appurtenance of
privilege, tainted at the source, but as a prescriptive right extend-
ing far beyond the narrow confines of the political sphere into the
intimate organization of society itself. (Polanyi, 1944/1957:256)
How might this be accomplished under contemporary circumstances?

In keeping with Polanyi’s hopes for the post–World War II pe-
riod, we should recognize the opportunities inherent in the Great Trans-
formation now underway. During this post–World War II (née Cold
War) period, we could be witness to the democratization of societies
and states through mechanisms of global governance and the prolifera-
tion of authorities, as well as the emancipation of peoples and cultures
as states lose their historical roles as defensive containers and iron
cages and become distinctive and diverse communities within a global
society. The path to such emancipation will require our active involve-
ment at all levels of politics and government, an involvement that must
go beyond parties, elections, and indirect representation.
Following this path also suggests that we will need to rethink the
notion of “citizen” and “citizenship,” and their relationship to new
“authorities,” as I suggested above. In the majority of democratic so-
cieties across the planet today, to be a citizen involves the exercise of
a few civic duties mostly done grudgingly, if done at all, and a grow-
ing unwillingness to contribute to the general well-being of the society
in which s/he lives. Returning to the argument I made in the opening

paragraph of this book, it is easy to see why this is so. As the state has
lost interest in the citizen, letting the market get the upper hand, the
loyalty of the citizen to the state has weakened. This is not necessarily
a bad thing, but it has served to undermine bonds of community and
social reciprocity and, in so doing, fostered a host of “solutions” that
only exacerbate atomization and alienation.
The “ethnic” or “sectarian” solution to this problem—the cre-
ation of ever smaller and purer states—hardly seems viable in the
longer term. The “globalist” answer—a world state or a planetary
ethos—assumes what Dan Deudney (1993) has called “earth national-
ism,” one that will be broadly shared by all 6 or 10 billion of the
world’s present and future inhabitants. World federalists propose some
combination of the two, akin to the civic identity we see in Catalonia,
“a country in Europe” and a province in Spain. In speculating on the
possibilities of citizenship under globalization, and the consequences
for democracy and representation under just and equitable authority,
perhaps it is best to return to the notion of “neomedievalism.”
While the medieval world is hardly an attractive model on which
to base a politics of the future, it nonetheless offers certain features
worthy of notice. Power differentials were extreme and hierarchy was
nearly absolute, but clients and patrons were enmeshed in a web of
mutual rights and duties that bound them together and that could be
called upon in specific situations. Moreover, the networks of relations
and loyalties linking individuals were not all territoriality based; as
Wæver (1995) notes, there was “a set of overlapping authorities” some
of which had little to do with space. The multiple levels of “citizen-
ship” developing in Europe, alluded to above, represent only one
possible form of political community.
In a global political system of the future, we could imagine many
political communities, some based on place, others on affiliations, but
linked relationally rather than through domination by or loyalty to a
single power. Such communities might be material as well as virtual,
possessing, for example, the power to tax members, represent them in
various political assemblies, and engage in functional activities such
as provision of certain welfare services, environmental conservation,
and education. A member, in turn, would hold “citizenship” in the com-
munity—and could simultaneously be a citizen of many such communi-
182 Chapter 8
ties. Such citizens could be called on to serve their communities in

specific political roles both within and in relation to other communi-
ties. Indeed, opportunities for “public service” at this scale might very
well generate an efflorescence of involvement in democratic politics,
to the benefit of all.
This will not happen automatically, nor is it likely to come about
through the decisions of states and capital; agency is essential. Human
beings are not bound to endlessly reproduce the forms and problems
of the past, nor are they complete prisoners of the logics of the present.
We are constrained by our histories, of course, and what we can do as
a result might not always be what we would like to do. Nonetheless,
along with constraints come opportunities and the possibility of imag-
ining choices and them making them. More than ever, it is important
to both individual and global politics that we recognize those choices
and make them carefully. Our future might be better or worse as a
result, but at least it will be a future that we have chosen.
Notes
Chapter 1. Theory of Global Politics
1. This is what happened in the old Soviet Bloc; today, it is taking

place, as well, in the West.
2. I realize that the first date is arguable. I am using poetic license
here.
3. Statements by former Soviet general Alexander Lebed, in Septem-
ber 1997, that one hundred nuclear “suitcase bombs” have gone missing in
Russia can only further stir up fears along these lines. It is puzzling, however,
that if they are truly unaccounted for, why none have turned up in the hands
of miscreants. Are they, perhaps, in the possession of the United States?
Chapter 2. The Worries of Nations
1. Not everyone takes a dim view of the workhouses. Gertrude

Himmelfarb (1995), for example, believes that ending the Poor Laws made
people responsible for their individual well-being and fate. The concept of
family solidarity has been examined by Francis Fukuyama (1995a, 1995b).
2. The Triffin Dilemma arose because U.S. dollars in the possession
of foreign countries could be exchanged for gold. Unfortunately, by 1960, the
183
184 Notes
United States did not hold enough gold to redeem all of the dollars in circulation
abroad. Were the demand for gold to outstrip U.S. gold stocks, the role of the
dollar as an international reserve currency could be undermined or destroyed.
3. Again, it is important to recognize that the “self-regulating market”
is a fiction; it must be supported by implicit or explicit agreements regarding
rules of operation (Attali, 1997).
4. A conventional security-based account can be found in Gaddis (1982;
1987). An economic account is Pollard (1985). A revisionist economistic
account can be found in McCormick (1996). A sophisticated and insightful
analysis of the process discussed is Gill (1993: esp. 30–34).
5. In essence, this is the core of the so-called Washington consensus,
the increasingly popular argument that democracies do not go to war with each
other. For a critical assessment of this claim, see Mansfield and Snyder (1995).
6. The dollar was exchangeable for gold at the rate of $35/ounce.
Americans could not hold gold bullion and only governments could officially
request gold for their dollars. At this rate of exchange, Fort Knox held about
$10 billion in gold.
7. Charles Tilly said “The state made war and war made the state.”
After World War II, the state made Cold War and Cold War made the state.
8. This was not the only reason underlying the extension of civil
rights to African Americans and the implementation of affirmative action, of
course. There was also a fear of urban revolt and a desire to show the world
that the United States did not oppress its minorities.
9. This continues to be the case today, as evidence by the high pro-
portion of non-U.S. citizens receiving doctorates in scientific and engineering
fields. According to Joseph Nye and William Owens (1996:29), “American
higher education draws some 450,000 foreign students each year.”
10. For example, the Soviet Union’s MIG fighters were as good or
better than anything the United States had to offer, but its avionics used
vacuum tubes rather than semiconductor devices. Tubes offered greater pro-
tection against the electromagnetic pulses associated with nuclear detona-
tions, but the Soviets used them because they could not miniaturize the
electronics.
11. The rise of the behavioralist model in the social sciences was part
of this process, too.
12. To be entirely fair, Buchanan put the blame on free trade; that his
analysis was, at best, partial and at worst, completely wrong, does not invali-
date my argument here.
13. People might be offered equal opportunities to succeed, although
even this is difficult to accomplish in practice. Even so, not everyone will
seize those opportunities and succeed.
Notes 185
14. A fascinating essay on the commodification of consumer shopping

habits can be found in Gladwell (1996), “The Science of Shopping.” It is a
simple matter to link the bar codes in a shopping cart to the name and address
on the check or ATM card proffered in payment, enter them into a database,
and sell the resulting information to the appropriate companies.
15. Stephen Kobrin (1997) argues that “e-money” poses a threat to the
most fundamental perquisite of the state: taxation.
Chapter 3. The Insecurity Dilemma

1. Although, as a graduate student project during the mid-1980s, I
tried to fit U.S. and Soviet nuclear missile deployments to different types of
differential equations. I found that competition between the U.S. Navy and
U.S. Air Force better explained the growth of American nuclear arsenals than
did an arms race with the Soviet Union.
2. The hammer-nail conundrum is usually attributed to Abraham
Maslow, who was supposed to have observed that “if all you have is a ham-
mer, everything begins to look like a nail.”
3. For an interesting list of “micronations” and hyperlinks to them,
see http://www.execpc.com/~talossa/patsilor.html.
4. Border studies is a rapidly growing field; there is a Centre for Border
Studies at the University of Wales, complete with peer-reviewed journal.
5. Ken Waltz attacked the idea of “peace through interdependence”
almost thirty years ago, in “The Myth of National Interdependence” (1971).
6. Twenty years ago, Stephen Krasner (1978) and others argued that
policymakers really did represent the singular interests of an autonomous
actor called the “state.” But even “strong” states no longer appear so unitary
as they once might have been.
7. The intersubjectivity of national-security policy was never noted at
this time. Threats were assumed to be real and objective; the state was as-
sumed to protect society rather than itself. Under conditions of mutual as-
sured destruction (MAD), preparations made for the continuity of state and
government in the event of nuclear attack would have resulted, in all likeli-
hood, in a state with no society to govern.
8. Although the literature on “redefining security” has proliferated
over the past ten years, the two defining articles are probably Richard H.
Ullman (1983) and Jessica Tuchman Mathews (1989).
9. Useful comparisons can be found in the Japanese and German
economic spheres of the 1930s and 1940s; for a discussion of the latter, see
Hirschman (1980).
186 Notes
10. It does not qualify as bona fide structural adjustment because the
dollar remains dominant in the global economy and the United States has not
yet been forced to reduce its budget deficits. But, it would be interesting to
compare the effects of somewhat similar policies on labor in the United
States and former Socialist countries.
11. For example, “electronic classrooms” may make it possible for one
professor to lecture to many classrooms at the same time, thereby reducing
labor costs for universities. See Marshall (1995b) and The Economist (1995a).
12. This is Huntington’s (1997) argument, as well. The question is
whether the “loss of enemies” is really such a problem.
13. Note that one of the most wide-ranging of such incidents to date
occurred as the result of satellite failure. For a couple of days, tens of millions
of pagers and thousands of computerized gas pumps went off the air. For an
insightful analysis of what can and does go wrong with computer-run com-
plex systems, see Rochlin (1997).
14. As Karl Marx said, “Adam Smith’s contradictions are of significance
because they contain problems which it is true he does not resolve, but which
he reveals by contradicting himself.”
15. Of course, “reality” is a loaded word. Inasmuch as the world and
its condition are described by language, there are limits to a truly objective
description. You and I can agree that that thing over there is a tank, but I say
it is for defensive purposes only, while you say it is for offensive purposes.
16. These are questions ordinarily not asked. Either definitions of se-
curity are taken to be objective and nonproblematic, or the state is reified
even as security and anarchy are treated as intersubjective constructs.
17. This is, in essence, the argument put forth by Alexander George in
Bridging the Gap (1993), although he does acknowledge that images of the
enemy are often inaccurate and that acting on such images may lead to
undesirable outcomes. A rather different perspective is offered by Smithson
(1996).
18. In other words, the enemy, and the threat it presents, possess char-
acteristics specific to the society defining them. See, e.g., Weldes (1992),
Lipschutz (1989), and Campbell (1990, 1992).
19. To this, the realist would argue: “But states exist and the condition
of anarchy means that there are no restraints on their behavior toward others!
Hence, threats must be material and real.” As Nicholas Onuf (1989), Alex
Wendt (1992), Mercer (1995), and Kubálková, Onuf, and Kowert (1998) have
argued, even international anarchy is a social construction inasmuch as cer-
tain rules of behavior inevitably form the basis for such an arrangement
(Lipschutz, 1992a).
Notes 187
20. This dialectical process is discussed rather nicely, albeit in a differ-

ent context, by Harvey (1996).
21. This contradiction was apparent in the initial landing of U.S. Marines
in Somalia in December, 1992. Demonstrably, there was a question of match-
ing force to force in this case, but the ostensible goal of humanitarian assis-
tance took on the appearance of a military invasion (with the added hyperreality
of resistance offered only by the mass[ed] media waiting on shore).
22. Ordinarily, this dialectic might be expected to lead to a new social
construction of or consensus around security. As I suggest below, for the
United States at least, the contradictions are so great as to make it unlikely
that any stable consensus will be forthcoming. See also Lipschutz (1999b).
23. This is not, however, to imply that state maintenance is the actual
goal. Rather, the constructing of a nontraditional threat to security was seen
during the last few years of the Cold War as a way of shifting resources away
from the military and toward more socially focused needs. Some in the mili-
tary—e.g., the Army Corps of Engineers—welcomed this shift as a way of
redefining their mission, perhaps creating a “Green Corps” to send ashore in
countries under environmental siege. For a detailed discussion, see Litfin (1998).
24. Often, borders are drawn down the middle of rivers running through
valleys because they make such visible and convenient markers. Difference is
thereby established even as the water and terrain on both sides are indistin-
guishable.
25. Star Wars would have drawn a line—or a surface—in the sky, a
dome within which the self would be secure and secured, and outside of
which would remain the eternal threat of the Other, but few believed that such
a surface could be made, much less made secure (see chapter 7).
26. Now, threats emerge because the lines of security, drawn around
Russian nuclear facilities, have literally dissolved, allowing fissile materials
to become commodified and objects of exchange. In the market, there are no
boundaries, only risks.
27. Although these are, apparently, what the United States has pro-
posed as NATO’s new objectives (Erlanger, 1998).
Chapter 4. Arms and Affluence
1. Another book by the same name is Oakes (1994).

2. Indeed, this point is demonstrated repeatedly in the opprobrium
incurred by Bill Clinton for never having served (or being seen to have
wanted to serve) in the military.
188 Notes
3. Indeed, the essential task of deterrence was to convince the other

that they would be used, although one would never want to get to the point
that they might be used. A typical bit of scenario building can be found in
Paul Nitze’s famous 1976 article, “Deterring our Deterrent.” For a full-blown
exegesis of this point, see Luke (1989).
4. The term “Finlandization” is worthy of an entire paper in itself.
One used to hear people say that to be like Finland would not be so bad;
today, no one wants to be like Finland, which is in an economic slump
brought on by the collapse of trade with the former Soviet Union.
5. There was, at the time, some controversy over why the Soviets had
put the SS-20s into Eastern Europe. On the one hand, some argued that it was
done to take advantage of the escalatory gap. On the other hand, some pointed
to the deployment as simply the arcane workings of the Soviet military-
industrial complex, which had taken one stage off of an unsuccessful, solid-
fueled intercontinental ballistic missile, thereby turning it into a working
intermediate range one. The latter argument would, of course, have implied
a state beset by bureaucratic conflict and irrationality, rather than one bent on
conquering the West.
6. It might be noted, in passing, that the eventual impacts of the SS-
20s and Euromissiles were greater at home than in enemy territory. The
waves of protest against the missiles in the West was viewed with great alarm
in many NATO capitals. In the East, the episode was the occasion of growing
contacts between Western peace activists and Eastern dissidents that, in the
long run, must have contributed to the revolutions of 1989 and 1991. See,
e.g., Meyer (1993).
7. Retaliation against Sudan and Afghanistan for the August 1998
bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania provides one answer to
these questions, although it is less clear whether this had the intended effect.
8. In addition to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the number of clear and
blatant invasions of one country’s territory by another since 1950 is small by
comparison with minor border incursions and civil conflicts: Korea (1950),
Southeast Asia (1950s–1970s), the Six Day War (1967), the Indo-Pakistani
War (1971), the October War (1973), the Ogaden War (1977), Vietnam’s
invasion of Cambodia and the Chinese riposte (1979), the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan (1979), Israeli invasions of Lebanon (1976, 1982), Grenada (1983),
Panama (1989).
9. The notion of “irrationality” tends to blend into cultural explana-
tions, whereby irreconcilable differences among cultures become the provo-
cation to conflict. On this point, see especially Huntington (1996).
10. For a somewhat distorted but nonetheless interesting exploration of
the impact of cultural differences on diplomacy, see Cohen (1991).
Notes 189
11. Indeed, the dance has begun to seem like farce, to the point that a
character on The X-Files (December 6, 1998) can plausibly claim that Saddam
Hussein is a guy from Brooklyn who, put into power by the CIA, rattles his
sabers whenever the U.S. government requires public distraction from other matters.
Chapter 5. Markets, the State, and War
1. This is not the precise wording of the document referred to. There,
the author (Serageldin, 1995:2) writes, “Agreement on access to water is an
important part of the peace accords between Israel and its neighbors. . . . As
populations and demand for limited supplies of water increase, interstate and
international frictions over water can be expected to intensify.”
2. To name just a few: Starr and Stoll, 1988; Starr, 1991, 1995;
Beschorner, 1992; Lowi, 1992, 1993, 1995; Bulloch and Dawish, 1993; Kally
with Fishelson, 1993; Hillel, 1994; Isaac and Shuval, 1994; Gleick, 1994;
Murakami, 1995; Starr, 1995; Wolf, 1995.
3. “Global deficiencies and degradation of natural resources, both
renewable and non-renewable, coupled with the uneven distribution of these
raw materials, can lead to unlikely—and thus unstable—alliances, to national
rivalries, and, of course, to war” (Westing, 1986: introduction).
4. “We are . . . talking about maintaining access to energy resources
that are key—not just to the functioning of this country but the entire world.
Our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom, and the freedom of friendly
countries around the world would suffer if control of the world’s great oil
reserves fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein” (President George Bush,
1990).
5. Although many scholars argue that wars between Israel and its
neighbors have been about water, the evidence in support of this unicausal
explanation remains thin.
6. The best example of this was the struggle over Alsace-Lorraine
between France and Germany. Only the shedding of the nation’s blood could
redeem the lost pieces of the organic nation-state. See Elias (1994).
7. As opposed to political geography, which studies the “relationship
between geographical factors and political entities” (Weigert, et al., 1957).
Geography can be changed, of course, as evidenced for example by the case
of the Panama Canal. Oddly, perhaps, the canal served to enhance American
power—it was now possible for the Navy to move from one ocean to the
other more quickly—while also exacerbating vulnerability: any other power
gaining access to the canal could now threaten the opposite U.S. coast more
quickly.
190 Notes
8. The dictum was: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heart-
land; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the
World-Island commands the World” (Mackinder, 1919/1962:150; see also
Mackinder, 1943).
9. Interestingly, as I noted in chapter 3 and discuss in chapter 6,
culture has become the most recent refuge for many of those international
relations scholars who are unable to account otherwise for the vagaries of
world politics; see e.g., Fukuyama (1995b) and Huntington (1996).
10. More recent expressions of this still-common view can be found in
Choucri and North (1975) and Organski and Kugler (1980).
11. Some writers, such as Richard Dawkins (1989), have gone so far
as to argue that the appropriate unit of competition and survival is the indi-
vidual “gene,” and that humans (and, presumably, other species) are only
containers for them. Of course, by that argument, bacteria and viruses are
probably “bound to win.”
12. Principle 21 abjures states to recognize the “responsibility to en-
sure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to
the environment of other States or of areas beyond their national jurisdiction.”
Cited in Nanda (1995:86).
13. Do we ever speak of “ecological interdependence” with, say our chil-
dren, spouses, significant others, or existing between California and Nevada?
14. Some have noted, of course, that renewable resources are not sub-
ject to this particular economic logic, inasmuch as their flows are large and
their stocks small or nonexistent. But economists still argue that markets can
prevent unsustainable depletion through the price mechanism. Unfortunately,
by the time prices rise sufficiently to impel substitution, the renewable re-
source may be depleted beyond recovery.
15. The 1997–98 El Niño illustrated this proposition rather nicely: in
the ocean, many species could follow the food from their normal feeding
groups, and blue whales, tuna, and marlin were seen or caught off the coast
of Northern California. Anchovy, being less able to go with the flows, died
in droves off the coast of Peru.
16. And the invocation to “free up” markets does little to address the
immediate needs of those who have no food.
17. The “double hermenutic” is a term used by Anthony Giddens to
describe how scholars use the behavior of policymakers to formulate theories,
and how policymakers, in turn, behave according to the dictates of theory; see
the discussion in Dessler (1989).
18. Nor did they recognize that, given the nature of oil markets, even
control of oil would not have prevented a generalized increase in prices; see
Lipschutz (1992a).
Notes 191
19. Parallel to the argument about old married couples, divorce consti-
tutes an effort to reestablish independence but usually serves to illustrate just
how difficult it is to completely sever the bonds of matrimony.
20. This is best seen in discourses about population. The rich consume
much more than the poor, but it is the rapidly-growing numbers of poor who
the rich fear will move north and cross borders (thereby ignoring the fact that
the rich moved south centuries ago).
21. This ignores the obvious point that human activities have never
been “neatly compartmentalized.”
22. The Newtonian “harmony of the spheres” remains with us today,
even as ecologists warn us that ecosystemic balance and stability do not, for
the most part, exist.
23. This is described as the “quantitative fallacy” by David Hackett
Fischer (1970:90).
Chapter 6. The Social Contraction

1. The recent literature on ethnic conflict is enormous. Among them
are: Lake and Rothchild (1998); Crawford and Lipschutz (1998).
2. Although he does not subscribe to this logic, R. B. J. Walker (1992)
provides numerous insights into the contradictions and pitfalls of territory and
sovereignty in Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory.
3. Although it is a rather crude measurement, a search of the Univer-
sity of California’s Melvyl bibliographic database under the subject category
“ethnic relations” turned up 5,761 citations between 1987 and 1997, as com-
pared to 3,197 prior to 1987 (with most of those being published during the
1980s).
4. “Stability” is obviously a tenuous concept. What appears to the
outside or historical observer to be stable is usually quite dynamic. See, for
example, the semifictional account of Visegrad, Bosnia, in Ivo Andric, The
Bridge on the Drina (1977).
5. In the U.S. context, Huntington and others call it the “American
Creed.” See also Lipschutz (1998b).
6. Culture can be understood as a form of social contract within a
group of people that shares certain types of social characteristics. Usually,
such a form is called “tradition” or “custom.”
7. The notion of actor choice in a structured context is discussed in
Long and Long (1992).
8. V. P. Gagnon disagrees with me on this point; personal communi-
cation. See his article (Gagnon, 1995) as well as Woodward (1995).
192 Notes
9. Such rents accrue even in the absence of “corruption.” For ex-

ample, on September 15, 1997, “first student” Chelsea Clinton arrived at
Stanford University, after having flown from Washington, D.C. on Air Force
One with her parents. Surely this perk is available to very few other college
freshpersons.
10. On this point, Kenichi Ohmae is correct; see The End of the Nation
State (1995).
11. By this I mean that in any one location, there are economic systems
of local, regional, national, transnational, and global extent. These are linked
but not all of a single piece. Thus, for example, Silicon Valley is tightly
integrated into the “global” economy, but some of its inhabitants are also
participants in a service-based economy that, although coupled into global
systems, is largely directed toward meeting “local” demand. For further dis-
cussions of the notion of “multiple” economies, see Gordon (1995). This
section has also been informed by a conversation with Randall Germain of
the University of Sheffield, April 20, 1996.
12. The term for such historical contingency is “path dependency.” See
the discussion of this point in Krugman (1994a: chap. 9).
13. How intentional or fortuitous is, of course, the key question. Sili-
con Valley was hardly the product of chance; rather, it was the result of
intentional mobilization of resources by the state in its pursuit of national
security. The difficulty of establishing such a development pole is evidenced
by the numerous failed research parks that litter the United States; the prob-
lems of maintaining a pole once established were illustrated by the relative
collapse of the high-tech center on Route 128 around Boston in the late
1980s. Some of the difficulties facing policymakers who might like to repeat
such mobilization are discussed in Crawford (1995).
14. The Microstate Network is at www.microstate.net; the Micronations
Page, at wwwl.execpc.com/~talossa/patsilor.htm.
15. One article (Hedges, 1995) on the Bosnian peace settlement sug-
gested that “United Nations officials said that they expect NATO to initiate
regional or neighborhood meetings to try and settle the complex claims and
counterclaims that are sure to complicate the agreement.”
Chapter 7. The Princ(ipal)
1. Which is why more than $20 billion have been spent on antimissile
defense research and development, and why several hundred million dollars
and more continue to be spent on it each year.
2. Susan Strange (1996) has also taken note of this phenomenon, but
she ascribes it to the “retreat of the state.”
Notes 193
3. Note that this is hardly a new argument and that in making it, I do
not propose the restoration of theocracy or a return to Victorian values, as
proposed by Gertrude Himmelfarb (1995). I do, however, believe that norms
and ethics are important; see Hirsch (1995) and the essays in Ellis and Kumar
(1983).
4. I do not mean to imply that the Treaty of Westphalia actually was
the means of accomplishing this; rather, it put the stamp of legitimacy on an
arrangement that had been developing for some time.
5. Barry Buzan (1991) acknowledges this in his schema of anarchies
ranging from “immature” to “mature,” but he retains survival in the state of
nature as the rationale for movement toward greater maturity.
6. This point is evident, as well, in “traditional” societies and com-
mon-pool resource systems, where violation of the mutual bonds of obliga-
tion and responsibility can result in eviction from the community.
7. And this does not mean that we now subscribe to a secular order;
see Bragg (1997).
8. The notion of “just war,” which represented an effort to impose
morality on the conduct of war, does not contradict this argument, I think.
Civilians were the subjects of the prince and his morality, not the source of
that morality.
9. The Jews, who had earlier been expelled from England, were
sufficiently powerless and few in number to make this practical; there were
altogether too many Catholics, however, for either expulsion or extermination
to be practical.
10. Thereby creating an inversion of Benedict Anderson’s (1991) “imag-
ined communities,” which we might call “unimaginable communities.”
11. Although, as we see in claims being made against Switzerland and
the former East Germany, extermination does not necessarily eliminate claims
to property.
12. One is left to wonder what might happen should we make contact
with non-terrestrial life, whether intelligent or not. Recent films (Men in
Black, Starship Troopers) suggest, in particular, that “bugs” are the enemy,
although some, such as The Faculty, warn us about our familiars, as well; see
Leary (1997).
13. That is not to say that domestic security was not a concern; the ever
vigilant search for ideological threats was pursued by a transnational network
of intelligence and surveillance agencies whose capacity was often far in
excess of any demonstrated need.
14. It was called the “Grand Area”; see Shoup and Minter (1977).
15. The distinction was never as great as claimed. The isolationists
wanted to keep pernicious influences out; the internationalists wanted to keep
them contained. Both aimed to avoid “contamination.”
194 Notes
16. The defection of Yassir Arafat from the bad bloc to the good bloc
clearly demonstrates how membership in both has more to do with morality
than power.
Chapter 8. Politics among People
1. I note here, as well, Susan Strange’s (1996) fierce attack on the

notion of “global governance” in The Retreat of the State, which reminds us
to always regard such neatly packaged concepts with a critical eye.
2. The very notion of cause and effect is rooted in the Enlightenment
and the triumph of scientific reasoning, not to mention investment and rates-
of-return. Even those who engage in risky, life-threatening activities expect to
go back to work after their vacation is over.
3. The regime literature of the 1980s and 1990s (see, especially,
Krasner, 1983) sought to discover and explain such patterned behavior among
states in the “State of Nature.”
4. Admittedly, liberalism recognizes only the authority of a
“watchperson state” that does not seek to regulate human behavior. Still, this
requires a very narrow definition of “state” and a great divide between it and
“civil society.”
5. For a general overview of perspectives on civil society, see Walzer
(1995), and Cohen and Arato (1992). For essays on governance, see Rosenau
and Czempiel (1992).
6. James Rosenau (1990; 1997) has taken the contrary tendencies into
account by theorizing “sovereignty-bound” and “sovereignty-free” actors. This,
I think, does not capture the entire dynamic, in that some of the actors in the
latter category would dearly love to move into the former.
7. At least, this is true in the political and policy realms; Polanyi still
has an ardent following in both academia and intellectual circles.
8. The author of the Economist survey cited earlier (1997) argues that
the source of international economic instability remains too much domestic
regulation and government intervention.
9. This does not mean that small companies are not innovative; rather,
that the owners of fixed property and small service-oriented businesses face
high social costs relative to revenues and find it difficult to liquidate their
assets and invest them elsewhere.
10. Rosenau and others have tagged the trend “glocalization,” although
I find this term exceptionally grating.
11. Heteronomous: 1. Subject to external or foreign laws or domina-
tion; not autonomous. 2. Differing in development or manner of specializa-
Notes 195
tion, as the dissimilar segments of certain arthopods. My meaning here is the

second, minus the detail about bugs.
12. The best-known discussion of the “new medievalism” is to be found
in Bull (1977: 254–55, 264–76, 285–86, 291–94). The notion of “heteronomy”
is found, among other places, in Ruggie (1983b: 274, n. 30). The term
“heterarchy” comes from Bartlett and Ghoshal (1990), quoted in Gordon
(1995: 181).
13. More to the point, as I have noted before, the “market” is not a
free-floating institution whose operation is guaranteed by the “laws of Na-
ture,” as some would have it; it is underwritten by a set of embedded rules
that are ideologically “naturalized” and that, consequently, seem to disappear.
14. In developing the following argument, I do not mean to ignore the
growing body of literature by numerous scholars, both male and female, on
the topic of feminism, gender, and international relations theory that has
provided important insights into the constitution of world politics. See, for
example, Tickner (1992), and Peterson and Runyan (1993).
15. I should note that this line of thought was triggered by Neil
Easterbrook’s use of Butler’s work in “State, Heterotopia: The Political Imagi-
nation in Heinlein, Le Guin, and Delany” (1997).
16. By this definition, therefore, civil society includes social move-
ments, various kinds of public interest groups, and corporations (although I
am not explicitly discussing the last here), all of which do engage in politics
of one sort or another. The state-civil society distinction is, sometimes, difficult
to ascertain, as in the case of the World Wildlife Fund/Worldwide Fund for
Animals and other similar organizations, which subcontract with state agencies.
17. This point is a heavily disputed one: To wit, is the international
system so undersocialized as to make institutions only weakly constraining
on behavior, as Stephen Krasner (1993) might argue, or are the fetters of
institutionalized practices sufficiently strong to modify behavior away from
chaos and even anarchy, as Nicolas Onuf (1989) might suggest.
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Index
Agnew, John, 88 Aron, Raymond, 2

alienation, 44, 126, 182 Atoms for Peace, 24
aliens, 193n.12 autarchy, 44, 89, 97, 154
Allison, Graham, 38–39 authority: after, 157–160, 170,
anarchy, 93, 97, 98, 103, 109, 132, 173; of borders, 58–59, 135,
140, 193n.5, 195n.17; and 142–145, 154, 167; and
markets, 140, 153–154; and citizens, 166, 178–179;
morality, 139, 141, 145, 153; diffusion, decline, and
social construction of, 186n.19. collapse of, 15, 118, 156,
See also Hobbesianism; State 157, 159, 165, 167, 179; of
of Nature discourses, 65; and elites, 54,
Anderson, Benedict, 110, 193n.10 165; establishment of, 27,
Andric, Ivo, 191n.4 165; feudal, 139, 165; and
Angell, Norman, 38 globalization, 4, 118, 165,
Annual Report to the President 168; and individualism, 4, 9,
and the Congress (Secretary 166; moral, 134–135, 137,
of Defense), 74 139, 142–148, 153–154; new
Arafat, Yassir, 194n.16 sources of, 135, 165, 171–179,
Aristotle, 155 180; and security, 48, 52, 54,
arms race, 34 61; of social contracts, 117;
221
222 Index
authority (continued) bordoids, 58

of states and political Bosnia peace settlement (Dayton
institutions, 5, 137, 139, Accords), 128, 192n.15
142–148, 156, 165, 173; Boulding, Kenneth, 155
threats to, 148; of the World Bretton Woods system, 19, 26,
Bank, 83. See also borders 146, 162, 183–184n.2
and boundaries; discipline; Brezhnev, Leonid, 70
morality Bridge on the Drina, The, 191n.4
Brodie, Bernard, 22
Brundtland Commission (World
ballistic missile defense, 133, Commission on Environment
192n.1. See also Strategic and Development), 103–104
Defense Initiative Buchanan, Pat, 27–28, 184n.12
Barber, Benjamin, 2, 107, 130 Bush, President George H., 159;
Barre, Siad, 50 administration of, 73, 80
bondage and domination, 8, 80, Butler, Judith, 168–169, 170,
148 195n.15
Booth, Ken, 3 Buzan, Barry, 49, 115, 123, 193n.5
borderlands, 60
borderless world, 154, 158
borders and boundaries, 36, 37, Cable News Network (CNN), 78,
81, 88, 129, 138, 159, 131
191n.20; in Bosnia, 128; and Campbell, David, 50, 138
discipline, 135, 137, 141, capital, 72, 175; finance, 40, 125,
167, 187n.25; fluidity and 162; flows of, 43; social, 23,
fragmentation of, 59, 126, 29, 40, 72, 120
138, 154, 167; and identities, capitalism, 194n.9; dynamism of,
90, 96, 100, 131, 134, 144, 124; and factor endowments,
146–148, 177–179; and 124–125; and the family,
geography, 84, 88, 112, 27, 29; industrial, 18; and
187n.24; moral authority of, production, 15–16; and
142–145, 153–154; and society, 15, 27–28, 158, 163,
resources, 93, 94, 96, 102, 173; and uneven develop-
105; and security, 58–62, ment, 124, 163. See also
130–131, 134, 146–147, 154; economic growth; globaliza-
and sovereignty, 86, 89–90, tion; markets
96–97, 102, 104, 112, 123, Carter, President Jimmy, 101, 102;
137, 140, 167; and war, 68, administration of, 76
73, 84. See also authority; caste system, 117
geopolitics; sovereignty; state Catholic Church, Roman, 134, 137,
border studies, 185n.4 139, 153; and England, 143
Index 223
Centre for Border Studies, 185n.4 Clinton, President William

choice: actor, 191n.7; rational, Jefferson, 34, 66, 109, 152,
theory of, 111, 156. See also 187n.2; administration of, 65,
irrationality; rationality 73–74, 134, 148, 149, 170
Christopher, Warren, 109 Cohen, U.S. Secretary of Defense,
Central Command, 76, 79 William, 74
cities: and political assemblies, Cold War, 20, 102, 107; 129;
178–179; and economic and civil rights, 184n.8;
development as war, 125, Compromise, 14, 19–21;
179; and municipal foreign conservatives, 26, 102; cost
policy, 125, 179. See also of, 63; discipline, 149; end
democratization; global civil of, 147–148, 187n.23; and
society; governance ethnic conflict, 109, 115; and
citizens: and the economy, 30, higher education, 23–24,
174; and the state, 39, 116, 183–184n.2; histories of,
126, 146 184n.4; and identity, 107,
citizenship, 60, 156; conceptions 138; renewal of during the
of, 166–167, 168, 171–179, 1980s, 149; and world order,
180–182; and deterritorial- 113, 135, 137. See also
ization, 177–179; economic, containment; Soviet Union;
30, 174; and political action, United States
159–160, 166, 175–176, collective action, 166–167. See
178–179; social and socio- also politics
logical, 116, 166, 179. See Coming Conflict with China, The,
also democratization; global 2
civil society; globalization; Committee on the Present Danger,
counterhegemonic social 102
movements; political commodification: of nuclear
deterritorialization materials, 187n.26; of
Citizenship Studies, 166 security, 45; of information
civil society, 4, 156, 172, 194n.5, about shopping habits,
195n.16; and relations with 185n.14
the state, 172–173, 176, common-pool resources, 193n.6
194n.4, 195n.16. See also Communist Manifesto, The, 17
global civil society. comparative advantage, 124–125;
Clancy, Tom, 72 and location, 123, 125,
“clash of civilizations” hypothesis, 182n.11, 192n.13
107, 112–113, 148; lack of Conference on Population and
material basis for, 112 Development, UN (Cairo),
Clausewitz, Carl Von, 64, 72 164
Clinton, Chelsea, 192n.9 Concert of Europe, 17
224 Index
conflict: causes, 105, 109, 113, credit: as a fictitious commodity,

115, 117; ethnic and sectar- 29; as a moral regime, 153.
ian, 108; and identity and See also fictitious commodities
difference, 100, 114; intrast- Cromwell, Oliver, 143
ate, 35, 113; metaphor of Crook, Stephen, 171
fault lines in explaining, 113– cultural: coexistence, 111; conser-
114; and opportunity struc- vatism, 145, 154; difference
tures, 114, 120; and politics and violence, 111, 188n.9,
of nostalgia, 118; postmodern, 188n.10; essentialism, 107,
36, 113; and social capital, 108; functionalism, 111–112
120. See also ethnic and culture: and citizenship, 166,
sectarian conflict; threats; 191n.6; definition of, 111–
war 112; as explanatory variable
Congress of Vienna, 40 in politics, 107, 190n.9; as
conspiracy theories, 56, 118– historical materialism, 110;
119; and the New World and identity, 107, 110, 111,
Order, 138; social construc- 113, 166; nature of change in,
tion of, 119. See also 111–112; and the proliferation
scapegoating of states, 109; as a raw
constitutions, as expressions of material, 112; and discourse,
social contract, 116. See also 9; war, 27, 90, 137–138, 145–
social contract 146, 154. See also borders
consumers, 152, 153, 184n.14; and boundaries; ethnicity;
and credit, 29 geoculture; identities; states
containment, 34, 41, 74; and currency exchange systems, 19,
economics, 41–43; as geopo- 20, 26, 183–184n.2. See also
litical theory, 146–147. See dollar
also Cold War; geopolitics cyberspace, 4; failures in, 186n.13;
Coordinating Committee hackers in, 4, 33, 46, 47, 55;
(COCOM), 42 and Pearl Harbor, 47; threats
Corbridge, Stuart, 88 to, 46–47, 149. See also
corruption, 123, 192n.9 enemies; threats; terrorism
counterhegemonic social move-
ments, 175–176. See also
citizenship; global civil Dalby, Simon, 88
society Darwin, Charles, 86, 88, 90,
Cox, Robert, 6, 35, 175 143–144
credibility, 67; of deterrence, 70; Dawkins, Richard, 190n.11
and rationality, 74; of threats, decision-making: and bureaucratic
68, 69, 76 politics, 39; and security, 52
Index 225
democratic enlargement, 116, 148 culture, 44, 145–146; by the

democratization, 9; global, 31, state, 102–103, 134, 138, 141,
164, 174, 180–182; urban, 145–146, 149–150, 159; and
176–179; and war, 148, threats, 69, 71; and war, 65,
184n.5. See also cities; 76, 80, 154. See also author-
citizenship; global civil ity; borders and boundaries;
society; politics; regimes security
Deng Xiaoping, 152 discourse(s), 85, 102, 105–106,
depressions and recessions: 112, 175; authority of, 65;
government responses to, boundaries of, 37; definition
18–19, 26 of, 49, 65; of gender, 169; of
Der Derian, James, 49, 59, 62 genetics, 91; geopolitical, 41,
deregulation, 108, 161–163 102; of market liberalism,
Derlugian, Georgi, 118 150; of population, 191n.2;
deterrence, 61, 69, 81; credibility of security, 48–50, 53, 55,
of, 70, 75, 188n.3; disciplinary, 58; of war, 65, 73. See also
8, 74, 78–80, 135, 148–150; ideology
extended, 58, 68, 76; nuclear, discursive practices, 51; speech
67, 68, 71, 72; and the acts as, 53
Revolution in Military Affairs, disorder, 155, 171; causes of, 15,
68. See also credibility; 158; domestic, in the United
disciplinary; nuclear deterrence States, 149–150
Deudney, Dan, 181 distribution, 95, 105; of global
Deutch, John, 46, 47 wealth, 30; of oil, 99, 101;
development, 122, 125; and and state power, 97; of state
history and political economy, financial resources and
125; uneven, and capitalism, domestic power, 121. See also
124, 163. See also capitalism; markets; power; states
economic growth; globaliza- diversity: and education, 24; and
tion; markets women and minorities, 26–27
Dirksen, Senator Everett, 68 division of labor: international,
disciplinary, deterrence, 8, 74, 78– 26, 112, 129; in the Soviet
80, 135, 148–150; warfare, Bloc, 43. See also labor;
77–80 production
discipline, 2, 8, 9; and borders, Dole, Robert, 65
59–60, 102–103, 167; dollar, 186n.10; and gold ex-
economic, 30, 153; and change standard, 19, 21, 99,
markets, 150–152, 153; and 183–184n.2; and U.S. gold
security strategies, 43, 69, 70; stocks, 21, 184n.6; and
in society and popular international liquidity, 19, 20
226 Index
double hermeneutic, 98, 171, upward mobility, 24. See also

190n.17 expertise; knowledge
double movement, 161, 175, 176 Ehrlich, Paul and Anne, 94
Dreze, Jean, 96 Eisenhower, President Dwight D.,
Dulles, John Foster, 151 151
electronic: battlefield, 68, 72, 81;
classrooms, 186n.11; money,
Easterbrook, Neil, 195n.15 185n15. See also virtual
ecological; balance and limits, 95, El Niño, 190n.15
104, 191n.22; interdepen- embedded liberalism, 20, 86, 97,
dence, 93, 105. See also 147, 180
limits to growth; resources; empires: European, 40–41, 129;
sustainability and peripheral intellectuals,
economic growth, 104, 163; and 110
comparative advantage, 124; enemies: and cultural difference,
and disciplinary deterrence, 111, 186n.17; imagined, 79,
78; and domestic hierarchies, 148–150, 186n.17, 186n.18,
115, 158; limits to, 102–105; 193n.12; lack of, 34, 186n.12;
and morality, 150; and peace, next United Statesí, 64, 148–
1, 37, 129, 154; and political 150. See also rogue states;
economy, 125, 192n.11; and threats; terrorism
the proliferation of states, English: Civil War, 143, 158;
109, 127–130; and restructur- liberalism, 124
ing, 44, 123–124, 186n.10; Enlightenment, 15, 135, 142, 143,
and U.S. allies, 26; and U.S. 194n.2
foreign policy, 20; and social entrepreneurs, political, 119–122,
change, 114, 118, 123, 162. 132
See also economy; globaliza- environment: and migration, 94;
tion; markets and security, 85, 86; and state
Economist, The, 78, 83, 85 power, 89
economy: and citizenship, 116, episteme: security, 53, 55, 56. See
167; and discipline, 30; also security; states; threats
international, 19, 122; and escalation: ladder of nuclear, 69,
liberalism, 20, 124; state 70, 188n.5. See also nuclear
control of, 42. See also deterrence
economic growth; globaliza- ethnic: cleansing, 59, 90, 131,
tion; markets; mercantilism 135, 144–145, 150, 193n.9,
education: and the Cold War, 23– 193n.11; relations, 191n.3
24; growth in, 23–24, 25, ethnic and sectarian conflict, 9,
186n.11; higher, 184n.9; and 35; and peace in Bosnia, 128;
Index 227
in Chechnya, 77; and differ- fictitious commodities, 16; during

ence, 111; as a form of self- the 1990s, 29
defense, 110; and instrumen- Finlandization, 61, 71, 188n.4
talism, 110–111; and intrast- flows: of resources, 190n.14,
ate order, 113, 160; narrative 190n.18; transborder, 37, 43,
sources of, 114; origins of, 190n.12. See also resources;
108, 109–115; as postmodern scarcity
warfare, 113; and state Fordism, 22–23, 129; and educa-
fragmentation, 108. See also tion, 23; and the 1980s
conflict; political entrepre- recession, 27; and production
neurs; war of nuclear weapons, 23. See
ethnicity: and communal au- also production
tonomy, 111; construction of, Foucault, Michel, 168
120; as culture, 110; and fragmegration, 6. See also
hierarchy, 117; politicization Rosenau, James.
of, 121; historical basis of, fragmentation, 6, 131, 167; and
100, 115, 143–144; natural- integration, dialectic of, 108,
ization of, 110; theories of, 124, 126, 157, 161, 170; of
109–111. See also citizenship; the public sphere, 126. See
imagined communities; also globalization; markets;
nationalism politics
eugenics, 90 frames of reference, 51–52
Euromissiles, 70–71, 102, 188n.5, free trade, 17, 124, 161; and
188n.6 peace, 37. See also economic
European Union, 36, 161, 162, growth; globalization; interde-
163; and multinational pendence; liberalization;
corporations, 36; and the markets
single currency, 129 Free World, 42–43, 97–99, 101,
expertise, competing centers of, 135, 136; borders of, 42, 61–
25–26; and global politics, 62, 134, 146–147; and the
25. See also education; sovereign individual, 42; as a
information; knowledge natural community, 42, 98.
Exxon-Mobil, 159 See also Cold War; contain-
ment; United States
French Revolution, 143
Freud, Sigmund, 114; and the
federalism and citizenship, 178– “narcissism of small differ-
179. See also citizenship; ences,” 114
democratization Fukuyama, Francis, 107, 159,
Ferguson, Kathy, 177 183n.1
228 Index
functionalism and neofunctional- Germany: Nazi, 41, 89, 93, 144–

ism, 160, 161, 172 145; Weimar, 41; and World
future: of the state, 160–165; War III, 60
worlds, 159, 165, 179–182. Gerschenkron, Alexander, 122
See also imagined Giddens, Anthony, 190n.17
Gill, Stephen, 6, 30, 153, 156,
175, 176
Gagnon, V.P., 191n8 Glaspie, Ambassador April, 72,
Gates, William, 159 75
Gellner, Ernest, 110 Gleick, Peter, 105
Gender Trouble, 168 global civil society, 5, 172; and
General Agreement on Trade authority, 156; and citizen-
and Tariffs (GATT), 20, ship, 160, 171–174; and
163. See also World Trade governance, 9, 160. See also
Organization democratization; governance
genetics, 90–91; determinism, 90, globalization, 4, 60; and author-
190n.11; and the Human ity, 4, 135, 157, 159, 162,
Genome Project, 90 165; and citizenship, 181–
geoculture, 108; and borders, 112; 182; and conflict, 36;
lack of material basis, 112; as consequences of, 14, 32,
manifested through symbols, 135, 179–182; defined, 14;
113. See also culture; “clash and democracy, 31, 164, 180;
of civilizations” and destabilization of
geography: political, 189n.7; and hierarchies, 115, 154, 158;
security, 88; and state power, and domestic conflict, 108,
87. See also borders and 115; and economic change,
boundaries 1, 118, 122; and identity, 36;
geopolitics, 86–91; of the body, inability to halt, 30; opposi-
90–91, 190n.11 and cartogra- tion to, 161, 163, 176; and
phy, 112; and culture, 108, production, 161; and regula-
112; definition of, 87; tion, 157, 163, 176; and the
discourses of, 85, 87, 98 112; role of states, 3; and secu-
doctrines of, 18, 84, 189n.7, rity, 7, 32, 36; and social
190n.8; and the domino change, 13–14, 118, 122,
theory, 146; and the Gulf 158, 167; and stability, 9, 36,
War, 80; and international 115, 118, 158, 194n.8; and
competition, 5, 162; and the U.S. national interest, 25.
“shatter zones,” 112. See See also capitalism; eco-
also ideology nomic growth; liberalization;
George, Alexander, 186n.17 markets
Index 229
glocalization, 194n.10. See also hegemonic stability theory, 98,

Rosenau, James 102; definition of, 98; double
God, 134, 139, 141, 142, 143 hermeneutic of, 98. See also
gold standard, 162. See also geopolitics; ideology
dollar hegemony: of Christianity, 141;
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 28 discursive, 55, 168;
Gordon, Richard, 173 Gramscian, 53, 98, 117;
governance: global and trans- really-existing, 123, 159
national, 5, 9, 156, 157, 160– heterarchy, 165, 195n.12
165, 165, 168, 174, 180, heteronomy, 165, 171, 194–
194n.1; local, 165, 174; and 195n.11, 195n.12
political action, 159–160, 174. Heilbroner, Robert, 159
See also authority; democrati- Herz, John, 7, 34, 45
zation; globalization Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 183n.1,
Gramsci, Antonio, 175 193n.3
Grand Area, 193n.14 Hiroshima, 47
Great Depression, 22 historical structures, 35, 111, 126
Gray, Colin, 2, 85, 87, 88 historic bloc, 175
Great Powers, 39, 86, 129 Hobbes, Thomas, 2, 8, 37, 62,
Great Transformation, The, 13, 139, 141, 143, 158
179 Hobbesianism, 72, 132, 139; and
Groh, Dieter, 119 genetics, 91. See also anar-
Ground Launched Cruise Missiles chy; State of Nature
(GLCMs), 70-71. See also Hoopes, Townsend, 151
Euromissiles Hull, Cordell, 85
Gulf War, 80, 85, 99; as arche- human rights, 32, 117, 147, 164,
type of future wars, 72, 73, 187n.21
74, 188n.8; costs of, 74; Huntington, Samuel P., 2, 107,
and disciplinary deterrence, 109–113, 138, 159, 186n.12,
76, 80; lessons of, 76. See 191n.5; and the “clash of
also disciplinary; Hussein, civilizations,” 107, 112–113,
Saddam; Iraq; Major Re- 148. See also culture; geo-
gional Conflicts; war; culture; ideology
United States Hussein, President Saddam, 72,
80, 189n.11, 189n.4. See also
Gulf War; Iraq; rogue states
harmonization of laws and hyperliberalism, 28, 157; and
regulations among states, 163- nature, 91. See also capitalism;
164. See also trade; markets, economic growth; globaliza-
and rule structures tion; ideology; markets
230 Index
identities, 114; and borders, 60, 90, 97, 105, 158; and self-
90, 96–97, 177; construction blame, 114. See also ideol-
of, 100, 110, 113, 120, 177; ogy; markets; self-interest
national, 45, 53; proliferation industrial revolution, 15–19, 24;
of, 36; and threat from the first, 13–14, 18, 23, 29, 30;
Other, 100, 120; threats to, second, 22, 30, 40; and
110. See also borders and impacts of, 14, 30; and social
boundaries; culture; ethnicity change, 13–14; and technol-
ideology, 28, 146, 176, 193n.13; ogy, 23; third, 15, 21–24, 30,
and culture, 113, 121; and 35. See also globalization;
historical structures, 35, 111; innovation; revolution
collapse of, 39, 54; interde- information: interpretation of, 51;
pendence rhetoric as, 101; networks, 160; as private
naturalization of, 86; of property, 29, 185n.14; and
success and failure, 114. See production, 22; revolution,
also authority; culture; 15, 22, 24; and security, 51;
geopolitics; markets; warfare, 46–48, 78–80.
naturalization See also commodification;
imagined: communities, 97, 110, knowledge; networks;
130, 144, 167, 171, 193n.10; privatization
consequences of war, 74; innovation: by U.S. allies, 26; and
enemies, 79, 144, 148–150, food production, 95; social, 7,
186n.17, 186n.18; futures, 68, 13–14, 18, 23, 24, 26, 30, 32;
71; threats, 49–50, 68, 69, technological, 17, 23, 26, 89,
144; wars, 63, 68, 70, 72, 78 163
imperialism: age of, 86; as insecurity dilemma, 4, 34, 36, 48,
response to economic depres- 60, 62. See also enemies;
sion, 18; and state expansion, security; threats
89; moral, 143 Inside/Outside: International
individual: and authority, 159; and Relations as Political Theory,
citizenship, 39; and identity, 1; 191n.2
and loyalty, 1, 55, 126, 132, interdependence, 59, 86, 97–102,
167; and markets, 4, 90, 191n.19; definition of, 99–
184n.13; and opportunity, 100; ecological, 93, 105,
184n.13; and security, 37; and 190n.13; as ideology, 101;
sovereignty of, 32; and welfare and peace, 7, 37, 85, 185n.5;
of, 44. See also ideology; theory, 99–101, 123. See also
markets; self-interest ecological; economic growth;
individualism, 167; and the Free globalization; markets; peace;
World, 42; methodological, war
Index 231
integration, 6, 122; and dialectic Kerr, Clark, 23

of fragmentation, 108, 126, Keynes, John Maynard, 19
127–130, 170; and peace and Keynesianism, 22
war, 7, 108. See also eco- Kissinger, Henry, 21
nomic growth; fragmentation; knowledge, 7; as capital, 29;
globalization; liberalization; mobilization of. for production,
markets 15; and national security, 25;
International Monetary Fund networks of, 177–178; and
(IMF), 19 power, 165. See also com-
International Organization for modification; information;
Standardization (ISO), 164, networks; politics; production
173; ISO 14000, 164 Korean War, 20, 74
International Trade Organization Krasner, Stephen, 185n.6, 195n.17
(ITO), 19 Krugman, Paul, 30
Iraq, 8, 78, 188n.8; discipline and Kull, Steven, 70
punishment of, 80; failure to
deter, 75. See also Gulf War;
Hussein, Saddam labor, 186n.10; demographics of,
Irigaray, Luce, 169 26; and downsizing, 28, 44,
irrationality, 75, 113, 156, 188n.9; 78; educated, 25; and the
of intrastate war, 108. See factory system, 15–16, 18;
also choice; rationality and information production,
Islam: divisions within, 113; and 44; and markets, 16; move-
umma, 112–113 ment and migration, 32, 43;
and restructuring during the
1990s, 28, 44; and security of
Jedi Knights, 72 employment, 44; unions, 18.
Jervis, Robert, 34, 45 See also education; globaliza-
Johnson, President Lyndon: and tion; knowledge
the Great Society, 26 Laitin, David, 120
justice, 114, 119; of social Lake, Anthony, 170
contracts, 117. See also social Larkin, Bruce, 58
contract Lebed, Alexander, 183n.3
Leher, Tom, 70
Lemarchand, René, 121, 122
Kahn, Herman, 69, 70 Leviathan, 8, 141, 158, 166
Kant, Immanuel, 2 liberal economics: and distribu-
Kaplan, Robert, 2, 159 tion, 95; neoclassical, 94,
Kennan, George, 41, 52, 87, 137 106. See also capitalism;
Keohane, Robert O., 99–101 economic growth; economy;
232 Index
liberal economics (continued) Mandelbaum, Michael, 169–170

globalization; liberalization; Manhattan Project: and mass
markets production of knowledge, 23
liberalism, 194n.4; conception of markets: and anarchy, 140, 150;
the state in, 137; economic, and authority of, 159; and
conditions for, 84–85, 97; citizenship, 167; and develop-
embedded, 20, 86, 147; ment, 124, 192n.11; and
English, 142; and the Free domestic stability, 123, 158;
World, 42. See also Cold War and initial factor endowments,
liberalization, 1, 16, 60, 108, 122; 124, 163; and food and
and the Cold War, 19–21, 40– famine, 96; and genetics, 91;
43; as a moral crusade, 152; and human nature, 151; and
and the New World Order, human rights, 32; as a moral
135; and the U.S. national institution, 150–152, 153;
interest, 25, 43. See also naturalization of, 86, 104–
capitalism; Cold War; eco- 105, 106; niche, 27, 129;
nomic growth; economy; opportunities in, 184n.13; and
globalization; liberalization; peace, 9, 129, 154, 185n.5;
markets and power, 123–124; as
limits to growth, 86, 94–97, 102– religion, 153; and rule
105. See also sustainability structures, 124, 140, 161,
liquidity, international, 19–21. See 162, 167, 184n.3, 195n.13;
also dollar and states, 32, 84, 131; self-
List, Friedrich, 2, 43 regulating, 13, 16, 20, 140,
Litfin, Karen, 48 161, 162, 179–180, 184n.3;
Locke, John, 8, 116 supply and demand in, 94,
Long Peace, The, 63 96, 104; and threats, 187n.26;
in water, 84, 105, 106. See
also capitalism; economic
Mackinder, Halford, 2, 85, 87, growth; economy; globaliza-
112 tion; liberalization; produc-
Mcpherson, C.B., 92 tion; reproduction
Mahan, Admiral Thomas, 2, 85, Marshall Plan, 20. See also Cold
112 War; containment; United
Major Regional Conflicts (MRC), States
74–77. See also Gulf War Marx, Karl, 17, 186n.14
Mann, Michael, 156, 175–176 Maslow, Abraham, 185n.2
Malthus, Reverend Thomas, 86, Meadows, Dennis, 94, 95
94, 95; critiques of, 95 Meadows, Donella, 95
Manchester School, 124 Mead, Walter Russell, 140
Index 233
Mearsheimer, John, J., 35 multinational corporations, 36, 41;

mercantilism and neomercantilism, and oil crises, 101
16, 18, 20, 30, 86, 89, 129; municipal foreign policy. See cities
in the Free World, 42, 147; in Mutual Assured Destruction
the Soviet Union, 43. See (MAD), 23, 133, 185n.7. See
also economic growth; also nuclear deterrence
globalization; markets
middle class: global, 30
Middle East: and water wars, 83– nation, 170; ancient origins of,
85, 189n.1. See also Gulf 143; constitutive elements of,
War 136; organic, 89–90, 143,
military force, 40; mobilization of, 144, 189n.6. See also culture;
40; and the state, 1, 129; and ethnicity; nation-state
strategy, 60; utility of, 66 nationalism, 17, 40, 115–116,
militarization: and domestic 123, 131, 134; Earth, 181;
policy, 150; of social welfare and genetic determinism, 90;
issues, 50, 51. See also Cold as imagined community, 110,
War; containment 131; and intellectuals, 110,
millet system, 117 176; and self-determination,
Milosevic, President Slobodan, 75 90; as a source of moral
mobilization: for war, 40; by authority, 135, 142, 154; and
political entrepreneurs, 120; sports, 116. See also culture;
political, 176 ethnicity; ideology; nation-
Montreal Protocol on Substances state
that Deplete the Ozone Layer, national interests, 117, 148,
164 185n.6; and borders, 58, 93;
morality: and consumption, 152, and global management, 25,
153; in domestic politics, 98; and individual interests,
136, 145, 152; in interna- 146; and interdependence,
tional politics, 136, 153; of 101. See also national
markets, 9–10, 150–153; of security; states
states, 9–10, 136–137, 140, national security: broadening of, 47;
148; and raw materials, 151; and crises, 38; and expertise,
and science, 142; and welfare, 25; language, 47; policy, inter-
145. See also authority; subjectivity of, 185n.7; policy-
borders and boundaries makers and, 52; and sover-
Morgenthau, Hans, 2, 39 eignty, 5; and state survival,
Moscovici, Serge, 118 38; United Statesí policy, 34,
Mother Teresa, 170 48–58. See also enemies;
mujuhadeen in Bosnia, 129 security; states; threats
234 Index
National Security State, 37–45; netizens, 177

definition of, 40; and domes- networks of knowledge and
tic discipline, 43–44; end of, practice, 160, 177–178. See
41. See also states also information; knowledge
“National Security Strategy for a Newton, Isaac, 142, 191n.22
New Century,” 34, 65, 152. New World Order, 135, 137, 159
See also Clinton, President Nietzsche, Friedrich, 49, 59
William Jefferson Nitze, Paul, 188n.3
nation-state, 162, 167; alternatives Nixon, President Richard, 21,
to, 171–179; and citizenship, 101; Doctrine, 21, 26
166–167, 175–176; emergence non-governmental organizations
of, 40–41, 142–145, 156, 175– (NGOs), 25, 168. See also
176; and empires, 41; future democratization; global civil
of, 157, 160–165; and mar- society; governance; politics
kets, 131; morality of, 136– non-state actors, 103, 157, 168–
137; as political community, 171
166; original, 142–143; and non-states: legitimacy of, 127–
self-determination, 90. See 128, 170–171
also authority; borders and North Atlantic Treaty Organization
boundaries; nationalism; states (NATO), 34, 68, 71, 72, 129,
natural community, 42, 98, 100, 188n.6, 192n.15; campaign
147–148 against Yugoslavia, 68, 75,
naturalization: of biospheric 76, 78, 80; function of, in
limits, 104; of boundaries, 1990s, 35, 61–62, 109,
105; of culture, 88, 107; of 187n.27; military strategies
ethnicity, 110; of genders, of, 60, 72. See also United
169; of geography and States
national power, 85, 87–88; of Northrup Grumman, 79
ideology, 86; of markets, 86, nuclear deterrence, 23, 61, 133,
104–105, 106, 150–151; of 147, 185n.7; credibility of,
national borders, 89, 103; of 67, 70; and discipline, 70, 71,
poverty and weakness, 167; 72; extended, 58. See also
of the state, 169. See also credibility; deterrence;
ideology ideology; nuclear weapons;
negative organizing principles, 55. threats
See also enemies; Huntington, nuclear disarmament, 71
Samuel; threats nuclear family, 27
neoliberal peace, 9 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
neomedievalism, 130, 165, 181, 164
195n.12 nuclear war, 45, 60
Index 235
nuclear weapons, 22, 183n.1; and Pershing-II missiles, 70–71. See

mass production of, 23; and also Euromissiles
targeting, 23; and threat to Polanyi, Karl, 7, 13–19, 28, 29,
use, 69; and use in war, 70. 161, 175, 176, 179–180,
See also Cold War; contain- 194n.7
ment; deterrence; nuclear political deterritorialization,
deterrence; United States; war 177–179. See also citizen-
Nye, Joseph S., Jr, 99–101 ship; counterhegemonic
social movements; demo-
cratization; global civil
Ohmae, Kenichi, 123, 159, 179, society; politics
192n.10 political economy: and local and
oil crises, 21, 26; domestic regional development, 125;
effects, 101; and oil prices, international, 98. See also
99, 190n.18; and Project economy; economic growth;
Independence, 101; and the globalization; liberalization
Synfuels Corporation, 101. political entrepreneurs, 119–122,
See also Gulf War 132. See also ethnic and
Onuf, Nicholas, 92, 195n.17 sectarian conflict
ontology: of security, 45; of politics: as authoritative allocation
states, 9, 143 of values, 159; feminist, 168–
organic intellectuals, 175–176 169, 195n.14; and global civil
Organization of Petroleum society, 172; and political
Exporting Countries (OPEC), action, 155, 159–160, 168,
99, 101. See also oil crises 177, 181–182; and representa-
“Others,” 49, 51, 59, 61, 97, 100, tion, 178. See also democrati-
109, 130, 145, 187n.25 zation; global civil society;
governance
power: domestic distribution of,
Pakulski, Jan, 171 124; juridical, and production
peace, 185n.5; as interval between of subjects, 168–169; legiti-
wars, 64, 87; movements, macy of, 122, 165; national,
133, 147, 188n.6; numbers of 40, 137; police, 2; and state
people living in a condition legitimacy, 142, 165. See also
of, 155. See also war authority
Peoples’ Republic of China Poor Laws, 16–17, 183n.1
(PRC), 98; and nationalism, Presidentís Materials Policy
123; as potential threat to the Commission, 151
United States, 55. See also princes, 139, 141–142; and their
United States subjects, 193n.8
236 Index
privatization: of commons, 16, 28; realism, 36, 45, 97, 105, 123,
of intellectual property, 29; of 179; conception of state in,
security, 45. See also property 136, 137; definition of, 93.
rights See also authority; borders
production, 6; and capitalism, 15– and boundaries; power;
19, 94, 124, 161, 192n.11, security; states
192n.13; and culture, 112; regimes, international, 98, 163–
and military infrastructure, 164, 174, 194n.3; accountabil-
39; niche, 129; and property, ity of, 164, 174. See also
94; social relations of, 15–16; democratization; governance
and surplus capacity, 18, 22; Reich, Robert, 26, 44
and war, 81. See also capital- reproduction: and culture, 112; of
ism; economic growth; domestic American conditions
globalization; liberalization; abroad, 20; of nonmaterial
markets; reproduction basis of state, 39; of security
property rights: commons and policies, 56; of societies, 117;
common pool, 16, 28, 193n.6; and the state, 172–173. See
enclosure and elimination of, also culture; production
16, 92, 145; intellectual, 29; resources: common pool, 193n.6;
of nations, historical, 144; control of, 110; distribution
and sovereignty, 85, 92–94, of among states, 93–95, 97,
97; state protection of, 136. 101, 191n.20; management of,
See also resources; sover- 93, 84, 102; and morality,
eignty 151; price of, 97, 190n.18;
Puritan Revolution and Common- renewable, 190n.14, 190n.15;
wealth, 153 shortages of, 21; substitution
for, 104, 190n.14; supply of,
40, 84, 93–95, 190n.14; trade
Quadrennial Defense Review, 57, in, 85; wars over, 9, 50, 83–
66–67, 73, 74 85, 94, 99, 105, 107, 189n.3,
quantitative fallacy, 191n.23 189n.4. See also flows;
scarcity; sustainability
Retreat of the State, The, 193n.1.
RAND Corporation, 70 See also Strange, Susan
Rapid Deployment Force (RDF). revolution: bourgeois, history of,
See Central Command 17, 175–176; electronics/
rationality, 74, 156. See also information, 22; French,
choice; irrationality 143; nuclear, 22; leaders of,
Reagan, President Ronald, 27, 94, 175–176; social, 17. See
133, 134, 135, 170 also industrial revolution
Index 237
Revolution in Military Affairs Schwartzkopf, General Norman,

(RMA), 65, 68, 71, 72, 81; 72, 76
and demonstration effect, 75, Seaton, Jim, 9
77, 78. See also disciplinary sectarian conflict. See ethnic and
deterrence; United States sectarian conflict
rights: human, 147; natural, 91, security: and Cold War conflicts,
116 129; defining and redefining,
risk, 31, 33; and uncertainty, 35, 37, 45, 48, 52, 56–57, 58–62,
62 185n.8, 186n.16; dilemma,
“rogue” states, 74, 75, 78, 80, 34, 45; and domestic disci-
129, 148–150. See also pline, 43, 187n.25; of em-
enemies; security; threats; ployment, 44; elites, 52, 53,
terrorism 55, 56; existential, 39; and
Roosevelt, President Franklin D., the future environment, 66–
85 67; and geography, 87, 147;
Rosenau, James, 6, 160, 172, and the household, 45; and
194n.6, 194n.10 individualism, 4, 32, 37;
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 2, 116 institutions, 35; and the
Ruggie, John, 20, 142, 165, 180 natural environment, 85; and
nuclear weapons, 61, 147;
ontology of, 45; policy,
Said, Edward, 100 making of, 48–58; policy,
Sakamoto, Yoshikazu, 156 consensual basis of, 54;
San Francisco Chronicle, 127 referent object of, 57; regime,
San Francisco Examiner, 125 35; social construction of, 36,
Sassen, Saskia, 178 48–58, 187n.23; as speech
Satan, 153 act, 53; and the state, 7–8,
scapegoating, 114, 119. See also 131, 141; studies, 57; supply
conspiracy theories; ethnic of and demand for, 38; and
and sectarian conflict surveillance, 50, 80, 148–150;
scarcity, 94–97; absolute and and uncertainty, 33, 35, 46,
relative, 94; and borders, 97; 54, 158. See also enemies;
of resources, 9, 84, 191n.20; surveillance; threats; states;
and struggle, 86; and substitu- war
tion, 104, 190n.14; of water, securitization, 53. See also speech
83–85. See also flows; acts
resources; sustainability self-interest, 4, 5, 27, 130, 132,
Scheer, Robert, 70 153; and genetics, 90; and
Schelling, Thomas, 69 national security policy, 54;
Schmidt, Helmut, 70, 71 and self-regulation, 153; and
238 Index
self-interest (continued) resources, 84; violations of, 93;

social warfare, 126; and and Westphalia, 130. See also
sovereignty, 140, 159. See borders and boundaries;
also individualism property rights
Sen, Amartya, 96 Soviet Union, 20, 21, 36, 88, 98,
Shapiro, Michael J., 177 183n.1, 188n.4, 188n.5;
Silicon Valley, 125, 182n.11, collapse of nonmaterial basis,
192n.13 39; and domestic discipline,
Skocpol, Theda, 173, 174 43–44; inability to innovate,
Smith, Adam (1723–90), 27, 140, 24, 43, 184n.10; and the
150, 186n.14 Resource War, 50; threats
social change, 13, 175–176, from, 76, 87, 99, 129, 133,
191n.4; and capitalism, 15 134, 135, 185n.1; and the
social contract, 17, 116–119, 166, SS–20s, 70–71, 188n.5,
191n.6; disintegration of, 118, 188n.6. See also Cold War;
158; fairness of, 117, 123– containment; United States
124; Free World, 147. See speech acts, 53, 69
also authority; justice Spykman, Nicholas, 2, 85, 87,
Social Darwinism, 18, 40, 86, 88, 112
151 SS–20 missiles, 70–71, 188n.5,
social organization, 156; and 188n.6. See also Euromissiles
production, 6, 15–16; and states: as biological organisms,
reproduction, 6; and scientific 88–89, 104; and citizens, 39,
research, 22–23. See also 41, 166–167, 178–179; and
production; reproduction citizens as threats, 51, 144,
social work and U.S. foreign 148–150; and climate, 89;
policy, 170 and comparative advantage,
sociobiology, 109 124; composition and struc-
sovereignty, 6, 85; and borders and ture of, 38, 115, 173; coop-
boundaries, 86, 92, 93, 96–97; eration among, 103; domina-
definition of, 91–94; and tion within, 121; and eco-
domestic politics, 100, 140; nomic expansion, 16; and
disintegration of, 3, 90, 123, elites, 110–111, 121; and
161; and individualism, 4, 32, exclusivity, 109, 130, 167;
42, 91, 92, 96–97, 140; and and family politics, 139;
liberalism, 92; as mode of forms of, 38; future of, 160–
exclusion, 85; and morality, 165; and geography, 85, 87,
139, 141, 147; and national 187n.24; and globalization, 3,
security, 5, 32, 66; and 157, 160–165; goals and role
property, 85, 92, 97, 130; and of, 38, 39, 169; as heir to the
Index 239
Catholic Church, 137, 143; State of Nature, 2, 5, 8, 9, 37, 84,

idea of, 53, 58, 84, 115, 123; 91, 132, 158, 193n.5, 194n.3.
and innovation, 89; institu- See also anarchy
tions of, 5, 53, 115, 123, 173; state system, international: and the
intellectual reification of and end of bipolarity, 35; and
commitment to, 122–123; and globalization, 157; norms of,
legitimacy, 54, 55, 116–117, 109, 127; legitimacy of, 122.
122, 123, 135, 137, 143, 160, See also states
165, 172–173; and loyalty to, Steinbruner, John, 39
5, 55, 110, 116, 160, 167; Stockholm Declaration, 92, 93,
material basis of, 36, 53, 84, 102, 103, 190n.12
88, 115, 123, 185n.15; as a Strange, Susan, 161, 182n.2,
mental construct, 39, 53, 130; 193n.1
and monopoly of violence, 3; Strategic Defense Initiative,
and morality, 134, 136–137, 133–134, 187n.25; moral
139, 141, 142–148; and purpose, 134; technical
multinational corporations, 41, feasibility, 134
173; pivotal, 33; and power, success and failure: explanation
40, 44, 53, 87, 93, 97, 110, of, 114, 184n.13
111, 137, 160, 165; prolifera- surveillance, 80, 112, 148–150,
tion in numbers, 109, 127– 153, 165, 185n.14, 193n.13;
130, 181, 185n.3, 192n.14; by FBI abroad, 150. See also
and property rights, 92, 97; security; terrorism; threats
redefining, 39; as referent sustainability, 86, 102–105,
object of security, 57; relations 190n.14; definition of, 104.
with civil society, 172–173, See also flows; limits to
176, 194n.4, 195n.16; and growth; resources; scarcity
rents accrued from rule of, symbolic analysts, 26, 44
133, 192n.9; and social
contracts, 116; and sports,
116; stability of, 117; stages think tanks, 25–26. See also
of life, 18, 39, 88–89; survival education; expertise
of, 38, 136, 193n.5; and technological: change as a cause
territory, 40, 79, 84, 86, 89, of disorder, 15; dominance,
102, 110, 157, 177–179; and 43, 184n.10. See also innova-
welfare, 40, 126; world, 161. tion; social change
See also authority; borders and terrorism, 32, 46, 129, 137, 149;
boundaries; enemies; global- counter–, 150, 188n.7; and
ization; governance; security; surveillance, 50, 148–150; and
threats asymmetric threats, 67, 148,
240 Index
terrorism (continued) Union of Soviet Socialist Repub-

183n.1. See also enemies; lics: See Soviet Union.
security; surveillance; threats United States: allies, 98; Bottom-
Thirty Years War, 134, 138 Up Review, 74; capabilities
threats, 4–5; assessment of, 35, and weaknesses, 67; Central
51; asymmetric, 67, 148, Intelligence Agency, 189n.11;
183n.1; to the body politics, Congress, 46, 128, 134;
51; breadth of impacts across decline during the 1980s, 98;
polity, 45, 47; credibility of, and democratic enlargement,
67, 68, 75; and discipline, 69, 116, 148, 184n.5; domestic
137, 146–148, 193n.13; politics, 99, 100–101, 136,
external, 117, 149; imagined, 137, 147, 152, 187n.23;
49–50, 68, 69, 111, 144, enemies, 64, 66, 79, 148–150,
148–150, 155, 186n.18, 186n.12; Federal Bureau of
188n.3; impacts of, 46–47, Investigation, 150; as hege-
66; proliferation of, 34, 44– mon and global manager, 98,
46, 49, 66, 137; rhetoric of, 128, 147, 159; and interna-
46, 47, 53, 155; social tional moral order, 138, 150–
construction of, 36, 50, 51, 153; leadership, 98–99, 101;
56, 148–150, 186n.17, legitimacy of institutions, 118,
186n.18; to security, 33–34, 67, 191n.5; and morality in
149, 155, 187n.26, 193n.13; to foreign policy, 146–148;
state system, 73. See also Mutual Defense Act, 20;
borders and boundaries; National Security Agency, 47;
enemies; identities; security; National Security Council,
surveillance; terrorism 129; national security policy,
Thucydides, 2, 94 34, 41, 48–58, 60, 74–80, 87,
Tilly, Charles, 32, 118, 184n.7 146–148, 185n.1, 187n.23,
trade: blocs, 162; and harmoniza- 189n.7, 193n.15; and oil
tion of rules, 163; and peace, crises, 99, 101, 190n.18; and
37, 85; and strategic goods, peacekeeping, 77, 170,
42; and weapons, 85. See 187n.21; Pentagon, 57, 66–
also economic growth; 67; potential for fragmenta-
globalization; markets tion of, 108, 126, 132;
Triffin Dilemma, 19, 21, 183n.2 relations with Peoples’
Triffin, Robert, 21 Republic of China, 55, 98;
Truman Doctrine, 20, 146 and rogue states, 74, 75, 129,
Truman, President Harry, 47, 146, 148–150; social discipline
151 during the 1950s, 44, 147;
Turner, Brian, 166 and social work as foreign
Index 241
policy, 170; threats to, 33–34, postmodern, 36, 158; social

44–45, 87, 99, 129, 137, construction of, 64; as speech
148–150, 187n.23. See also act, 69; virtual, 8. See also
Cold War; containment; conflict; ethnic and sectarian
liberalization conflict
warfare: information, 46–48,
67; social, 10, 77, 115,
Vandenburg, Senator Arthur, 47 132. See also conflict; war;
Vietnam War, 25 virtual
virtual: communities, 177; money, Warsaw Pact, 20, 72
29, 185n.15; war, 8, 78. See water: as a commodity, 85, 105;
also electronic wars over, 83–85, 93, 105,
von Krosigk, Count, 93 106, 189n.1, 189n.5. See also
flows; Middle East; resources;
scarcity
Wæver, Ole, 53, 165, 181 Waters, Malcolm, 171
Walker, R.B.J., 191n.2 weapons of mass destruction:
Wall Street Journal, 127 nuclear, 22, 183n.1; and
Waltz, Kenneth, 2, 140, 185n.5 terrorism, 7, 35, 46, 149. See
Wapner, Paul, 168 also nuclear deterrence;
war, 8, 188n.8; causes of, 38, 65, nuclear weapons; threats;
73, 84, 105, 108, 109–115; terrorism
civil, 9, 35, 108, 113, 115; Weinberger, Caspar, 70
conventional, 77; costs of, welfare and morality, 145, 151
63–64, 67–68; and democ- welfare state, 17, 40, 166;
racy, 148, 184n.5; discourses attack on, 26, 145, 151; in
of, 65, 148; on drugs, 50; and nineteenth-century England,
economic intercourse, 38, 28; reduction of, 27, 109,
185n.5; future, 72–73; 162; securitization, of, 50–
imaginary, 63, 69, 73; 51. See also globalization;
interstate, 73; just, 193n.8; as liberalization; morality
a moral event, 142; and Westphalia, Treaty of, 138–139,
municipal economic develop- 141–142, 193n.4; as a social
ment as, 125; low-technology, contract for European society,
77, 94; nuclear, 134; objec- 139–140. See also borders
tives of, 79; over idea(l)s, and boundaries; princes;
108; over resources, 9, 50, social contract
83–85, 94, 99, 105, 108, White, Harry Dexter, 19
189n.3, 189n.4; over water, Wilson, President Woodrow, 90
83–85, 189n.1, 189n.5; World Bank, 19, 83–85, 164
242 Index
World Commission on Environ- 184n.7; Three, 8, 23, 60–61,

ment and Development 63–64, 67, 69, 81, 161
(WCED), 103–104. See also World Wide Web, 177. See also
sustainability electronic, networks, virtual
World Federalism, 159
World Trade Organization, 20, X-Files, 189n11
162, 163, 173. See also trade
World War: One, 17, 40; Two, 3, Yeats, William B., 36
14, 15, 22, 23, 40–41, 54, 87, Yeltsin, President Boris, 54
144, 146, 158, 167, 180, Young, Iris Marion, 171, 178

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AFTER AUTHORITY

SUNY series in Global Politics

State University of New York Press

© 2000 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever

For information, address State University of New York Press

Production by Michael Haggett

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1 Theory of Global Politics 1

Once, it seems, we knew what to do.

presented, and published ﬁt together in what I thought (and what I

Portions of chapter 6 were originally published as Ronnie

The nation-state is in trouble. It is under siege by contradictory forces

remains the reserve currency of international relations, it is of limited

between these two poles or even elsewhere. It is always difﬁcult to

sovereignty is disintegrating. States are less able to perform their

argue that the project of “globalization” (an ill-deﬁned and all-encom-

What This Book Is About

This book reﬂects on these matters, on the “end” of authority, sover-

that go hand-in-hand with changes in production and purpose. Why,

(and women) begin to build societies and civilizations. In chapter 5,

(or even postmodern) response to fundamental social change. The

good (and is good), and it is the individual’s responsibility to consume

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied

prosperity by reproducing, as much as possible, domestic American

What Are Industrial Revolutions?

The causes and consequences of the social, political, and economic

by the “workhouse” and competitive labor markets that undermined

against one another, as emerging doctrines of geopolitics combined

The Cold War Compromise

GATT provided something of a substitute until the establishment of

throughout the developing world posed a mortal threat to this project

The Third Industrial Revolution

The Revolution at Home

the state’s, providing gainful employment to many “symbolic analysts,”

Into the Breach

Thus, the international political and economic turmoil of the 1970s—

Third, “opportunity only knocks once.” As people ﬁnd it neces-

Of course, not everybody is automatically eligible to participate

[T]he substantive conception of citizenship involves not only a

Beginning in adolescence, he argues, this acts to discipline and social-

Spare Change in World Politics

The postwar project of economic globalization has, perhaps unin-

What is “security?” What does it mean to be “secure?” Who or what

observable capabilities—what the other side could do—or on intent—

chapter 6, the working assumption of such analyses is that these wars

The End of the National Security State?

It has become fashionable (once again!) to say that “states no longer

Norman Angell in 1910; see Angell, 1910). There is a contrary school

failed to achieve this level in either scale or scope (Friedberg, 1991;

unit of analysis and policy. The liberalization project of American

exported (Pollard, 1985; Crawford, 1993; Mastanduno, 1991). The

Confronting the Insecurity Dilemma

The difﬁculties associated with “redeﬁning security policy” (Krause

“new” ones discussed or imagined by policymakers, academics and

[e]vidence that a number of countries around the world are devel-

Asked whether the threat of such attacks was comparable to those

is heavily dependent on electronic software, hardware, and networks,

New Threats or No Threats?

It is in this context that the insecurity dilemma emerges full-blown to

As determinants of what can and cannot be thought, discourses